Berlin, where President Obama spoke today, was for many of my generation – and for those older – the scariest of places.

I’m speaking about the 1960s… What historian Michael Bechloss called “The Crisis Years.”

The crisis was the frightening chance that this planet of ours would burst into nuclear war, with the United States and the then-Soviet Union firing their vast arsenals of inter-continental ballistic missiles in one devastating conflagration that left the world destroyed, our atmosphere poisoned beyond the level of human survival.

Always in these “Crisis Years” it was the city of Berlin that could ignite this horror in our lifetimes, bringing with it the end of life, certainly as we can imagine it, or would want to recognize it.

Beginning with the defeat of Germany in the spring of 1945, the American, British and French had maintained an occupation in West Berlin, an island of freedom surrounded by the brutal dictatorship of East Germany, patrolled by the secret police – the Stasi – and garrisoned by 350,000 Soviet bloc troops.

West Berlin was in those early years of the 1960s, the “detonator cap” for a Third World War.

Why? Because if the Soviets had decided to grab it, the United States would have had just a sliver of the conventional military power to resist. Within hours we would have had to decide whether to yield the city up – along with the freedom of its residents – or use tactical nuclear weapons to ward off the attacking Red Army of 350,000 strong.

This is the prospect – the possibility that Kennedy would have to make this choice – that kept him worried day and night – that he would be the American president who would be forced to start a Third World War, a nuclear, world ending war.

This is what the Cuban Missile Crisis was about – not the island in the Caribbean where the Russians had placed offensive nuclear weapons – but what the Russians would do if we invaded it, the threat – made by Soviet leader Khrushchev in a letter to President Kennedy – that he would respond by taking Berlin – thereby setting up the nuclear tripwire, starting the countdown to a Third World War.

This is what Berlin meant in the years 1961 and 1962. It’s why Kennedy said when he heard the Russians had put up the Berlin Wall: “Better a wall than a war.”

It’s why the people of West Berlin were so exuberant when Kennedy came to visit in June 1963 – fifty years next week. It’s because the American people were determined to stand their ground in defending them.

More than that, it was our country’s statement to the rising Third World, especially the new-independent countries of Africa that this was the choice they faced in building their own societies – a free West Berlin – or a society that needed walls to keep its people in.

“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,” said Kennedy. “Let them come to Berlin. There are some who say that communism is the wave of the future. Let them come to Berlin.”

Jack Kennedy’s speech in West Berlin was for all these reasons the finest statement of the Cold War – what the conflict was about, what the stakes were, what the rising new world should learn from it.

Nothing in my life was so stirring historically than to stand on the Eastern side of the Brandenburg Gate back in 1989 and ask a still-captive East German what freedom meant to him – and have him respond in German that it was the ability to talk openly with an American reporter: Me

If we’re going into another Mideast war – after Afghanistan, after the US invasion of Iraq, after our “leading from behind” in Libya – shouldn’t there be some kind of vote on whether we do it?

Shouldn’t we do it the right way and end diplomatic relations with the Government of Syria before we start handing out rifles to people out to kill the leaders of their country?

Wouldn’t that be the serious, right thing to do if we are, ourselves, are serious about this. If we’re going to commit an act of war against another government, shouldn’t we be straight up about it?

Or is overthrowing Islamic governments what we do now? Is that now the natural business of this country?

So why don’t we change the name of the Department of Defense to the Department of killing Islamic people on global television department because that’s what we’ve been doing for a dozen years.

I’m being sarcastic because it’s the only way to describe what I consider the true American reaction to this thing we now do without even having a vote on the matter. We don’t bother to declare war because it’s become just the normal thing we do.

Why declare it when war’s become the new damned normal.

I’d like to say something about this thing at the IRS.

If Elijah Cummings is right, it’s not a scandal. It’s more like a screw-up.

If it’s all about something that happened in the IRS itself – and that’s the way it looks right now…

If there’s no reason to believe that the Obama people were involved in singling out the Tea Party and Patriot group looking for tax exempt status…

Then let’s be honest – everyone – and say so.

Isn’t that the fair thing to do? You know, innocent ’til proven guilty.

Or is there a new rule across this land that you can keep accusing someone of something as long as you darn well please?

As long as you’ve got a mic in your hand, or a committee chairmanship, you can spew out charges ’til you drop?

Well, if that’s the game, then the rule of fairness, of truth, of common sense is out the window.

If all you’re doing is calling names, you’re no different than the bully in the high school recess yard… The bully who mocks and humiliates and is the worst memory from our youths… The person who “is” everything that’s wrong in human life – the kid we try and, if fortunate, are able to leave behind in human society’s backwash.

We just learned today that more non-Hispanic whites in the U.S. died last year than were born. It’s a remarkable statistic.

Obviously, people from different groups will have different reactions.

White people may feel their position narrowing somewhat, minorities may feel their position is growing; immigrants may feel the country is getting more diverse down the road.

The vital fact is that the country’s demographic face is changing.

We are becoming much more like the “Many Faces of Benetton” ad.

We are getting more like the picture you get of America when you visit a city rather than when you’re in the countryside – more differences of appearances, more apparent differences in background, perhaps in values and politics as well.

But the challenge remains: to build unity out of differences, e pluribus unum, one from many.

What’s changed is that the pluribus is growing; growing with it is the challenge, the increased challenge of becoming “one.”

I am a believer in both political parties including a moderate wing. Republicans need to have people who are more liberal. Democrats can use people who are more conservative.

Why? Because it’s the only way to build a solid, “governing” majority, and because without a majority, a party cannot govern.

Mike Bloomberg is out there punishing those Democratic senators who failed to support the “gun safety” position this spring.

I don’t think it will have its desired effect. I think the senators themselves will fight back against the “Eastern Influence.” If they reverse their votes, their future opponents will say they’ve been bought or whatever by the billionaire mayor of New York.

So I don’t see this kind of thing turning around the vote.

What I do see working is taking the Republican position on gun safety and building on, strengthening it.

It’s far easier to get people to bolster what they’ve agreed to than it is to admit they were wrong.

Think about it. We need to get something done here.

Nelson Mandela is in critical condition tonight. Perhaps the world’s greatest hero… he built his historic legacy while still in prison. He refused to leave Robben Island until white-ruled South African legalized the African National Congress. When it did, we knew the world was changing down there, that getting majority rule was just a matter of time.

I was there when the first election was held – when Mandela was elected president of South Africa. It was a glorious day of people waiting in line for hours so they could be part of the great change coming over that country, a change Nelson Mandela made possible.

We all thought it might take horrible bloodshed to change South Africa. The United States played a part in making that “not” the case. We did it with the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986 which brought economic sanctions against the white-ruled society. It helped to change history for the better.

I had the privilege of being with Archbishop Tutu when he voted that great day in 1994, of interviewing Nelson Mandela, the president-elect afterwards. It was, along with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the greatest stories I’ve gotten to cover. I expect to be going to South Africa to honor the great man once again when the time comes.

It is impossible to measure the good his pain, his faith, his leadership has meant to our time.

It was he who instilled in millions of South Africans the power of the ballot, the joy of democracy.

I heard the news early in the morning on the radio in a Montreal hotel. At first, like others, I thought it was a re-dramatization of Dallas five years earlier. I had tuned in to find out who had won the California Democratic primary between Gene McCarthy and Kennedy. Only after listening for several minutes did I realize this was all happening live. Bobby Kennedy had been shot!

People don’t remember all this. He was shot by a Palestinian angry at Kennedy’s pro-Israeli campaign appeal. Sirhan Sirhan was, if you think about it, an early case of Mideast terrorism directed at the United States. He shot Bobby Kennedy because of what the New York senator stood for in foreign policy.

To most Americans, Bobby stood for something altogether different. He was a tribune for the people who needed one: A victim himself because of his beloved brother’s assassination, he came across to people of color and people who were denied a real chance in this country as a fellow soul, someone who knew what it meant to be hurt by the system.

I think people loved this guy for something else. He was a liberal who didn’t believe in the BS sometimes and too often associated with it. He believed in giving people who needed it a break and he saw the unfairness of life but he also believed in people playing by the rules. You broke the law and you were a criminal in Bobby’s eyes, whether you were a big shot or not. He was a law-an-order liberal, a liberal who never stopped being an Irish cop.

That’s how I like to remember him because that’s the kind of person I want to see in politics, the kind of person I want very much to be myself.

I sometimes worry that I’m not keeping up with the times. I don’t know anything about the current music scene. I can’t even tell you much about the current generation of movie actors – though I do know a number of truly superior ones like Jennifer Lawrence.

But when I hear some of the Republicans in the Congress talking, I have this feeling I’m Mr. Today, Mr. State-of-the Art, on American culture.

Why would a senator say that rape is understandable because boys are sexually excited during the years during their late teens and early twenties?

Of course they are, but what’s that got to do with rape and assault – sexual assault?

What does it say about the human life to say something like that?

And what does it say that you blame rape and, again assault cases, here sexual assault, on the presence of “sexually explicit magazines.” Every airport’s magazine rack is loaded with women provocatively shown photographed. Does that justify or even explain sexual violence in the skies?

These guys. That’s all I got to say. They talk about rape and vaginal probes and all kinds of stuff that they would better off not even talking about.

A lot of us say we’ve evolved on issues like marriage equality. Hell, most of the country.

These guys come across as far further back – I’d say really back – in that evolutionary history of ours.

Do you think, we might just be talking the Cro Magnin stage.

The clown car — once filled with the Republican vagabonds running so absurdly for President last year — has been refilled.

Today, that clown car is packed to the roof with a roving crew all shouting the same words – “court-packing” — Benghazi — IRS! — “enemies list” — Nixon!

The party that put Richard Nixon on its national ticket five times — in every election but one for twenty years — from 1952 through 1972 — is now making him a name for the smearing of a good president, the goal on which Reince Priebus and all the others have set their hearts.

Their rules are those of a tougher, coarser Republican, of course, Joseph McCarthy.

They don’t need evidence to make their charges. Oh no.

One Congressman said that the IRS in Cincinnati was working off an “enemies list” coming from the White House. I read that accusation looking for the evidence only to realize I’d been snookered. There is no evidence. The congressman simply “declared” that there’s an ”enemies list,” simply “declared” that it was the list used in the IRS offices in Cincinnati.

Darrell Issa, the self-styled prosecutor made some charge against Obama the other day and then said something that sounds like something out of Orwell. “We’re getting to proving that.”

“WE’RE GETTING TO PROVING THAT.”

He’s charged the president with something, and then admitted he hasn’t proven it. He’s “getting to” proving that.

It’s polluted politics, polluted by so much hatred of this president that all it takes to make a charge is the obsession to do it.

There are two points I think everyone watching can agree upon.

Point one: the charges against the President have missed the mark. They are not about him personally because the cases that have been clumped together as “scandals” have occurred without him being involved. That doesn’t mean they don’t involve trouble, simply that they don’t point to the president as the trouble-maker – nor do they necessarily point to corruption. Much of this could just be governmental – or rather political! – ineptness.

But this gets to my second point: a failure of sharp, quick, on-the-job politics.

I still don’t get why the President wasn’t on top of the IRS mess from the moment his people heard about it. He could have been right there backing up the Inspector General, could have been the guy wearing the white hat instead of the one taking flak. He could have been on top of this mess instead of being vulnerable to charges of being behind it.

I continue to think the White House lacks a strong chain of command that the president trusts to keep him politically strong. As we read in Jonathan Alter’s new book, The Center Holds, the White House lacks the strong organization coherence of the campaign.

If anyone disagrees, from inside or outside the White House, please tell me the chief of staff is the top person reporting to the president.

Tell me that he has the ability to hire and fire and that he is the one giving orders of the President’s behalf — that he has the authority and the power to do so.

I just don’t see it. What I see are a group of people who aren’t confident the president has their back, not confident therefore to cover his back.

I’m calling it as I see it