Lessons from Berlin

Germany, not the Middle East, was the most important part of Barack Obama's overseas trip—and not because of the Kennedy-plus crowd and the good vibes his speech created for his presidential campaign. Germany is the true Ground Zero of world history in the last 100 years, the source of two world wars and nearly the flashpoint of a third. I covered both Obama and John McCain last week; spoke with former president George H.W. Bush about his greatest triumph, aiding the peaceful reunification of Germany, and took a history bath in sparkling Berlin. It's the perfect place to contemplate how any U.S. president might avoid what Obama called the world's "greatest danger" of "new walls" between races, tribes, religions, rich and poor.

History drives everything, including the disparity in media coverage, with Obama (even before this week) drawing many more reporters to his plane than McCain. The grinding of economic and technological forces has disabled the traditional business models of news organizations. To the shock of political veterans, NBC News is the only network with on-air correspondents and NEWSWEEK the only news magazine with reporters assigned to cover both candidates full time. Ailing regional newspapers show up only occasionally, which thins the herd. With traveling costs "inside the bubble" of more than $4,000 per reporter a week, news outlets often have to choose which candidate to cover. That's usually Obama, not because everyone assumes he should win or will win, but because he is the bigger story, historically speaking.

This is understandably frustrating to McCain, who reads history and has lived plenty of it. He's running against a phenomenon as much as a candidate. McCain was so annoyed early this week about being marginalized that he played a practical joke on the small band of reporters following him, head-faking us into thinking he might announce his vice presidential choice at a town meeting in Rochester, N.H. Instead he used the occasion to take his attacks against Obama right out of bounds. Obama, he said in Rochester (and would repeat), "would rather lose a war in order to win a political campaign."

McCain's history, in the books he reads as well as those he writes, is largely military history. Even when not devoted to explicitly military topics, it's about honor, courage and vigilance—timeless values, all. War and peace (note the hastily arranged meeting with the Dalai Lama) is the template.

This is a necessary but insufficient approach to writing the history of the new century. When McCain spoke in Rochester about AIDS and poverty, it was to say that "the challenge of radical Islamic extremism is not just military, we must eliminate the breeding grounds of terrorism." In other words, every problem in the world is subordinate to addressing what he calls today's "transcendent" threat. Global problems that don't fit on the war-peace grid (e.g., climate change) are important but secondary. This is unwise. Terrorism becomes the "transcendent" or "existential" (to use the cool Camus word of the moment) threat only if it goes nuclear. But McCain has not stressed nonproliferation as the central theme of his foreign policy, as Obama (who has Senate experience on the issue) did in Berlin.

McCain is a flexible, non-ideological thinker. But is he an imaginative global strategist, or, with the help of people like Henry Kissinger, a bit too 20th century? Right now it looks more like the latter. In the judgment department, both candidates have one hit and one miss on Iraq, with Obama opposing the trillion-dollar war from the start, and McCain supporting the surge policy that has helped bring a fragile peace. The tie-breaker, a stroke of luck for Obama, is that his withdrawal policy is now the one aligned with that of the sovereign nation of Iraq.

Of course, for all his fine speeches, we have little idea of how Obama—or McCain for that matter—would perform in a crisis. That makes it all the more interesting that Obama's looking for inspiration to the presidency of George H.W. Bush, who appeared with McCain last week on the lawn outside his Kennebunkport summer home. Bush, who allowed he's a "little jealous" of Obama's reception in Germany, is getting major points from historians for helping the cold war wind down peacefully in Eastern Europe without patriotic gloating. While giving Mikhail Gorbachev and Helmut Kohl the credit, Bush told me things might have gone differently "if I'd listened to the majority leaders of the Senate and House [both Democrats] who wanted me to dance on the [Berlin] Wall and put a stick in Gorbachev's eye."

The fruits of Bush's careful diplomatic approach can be seen at the Brandenburg Gate, a Berlin Wall "kill zone" until 1989, now glittering. Nearby, other reminders of the tortured history of 20th-century Berlin gave me unexpected hope. Peter Eisenman's brilliant and haunting three-year-old Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe is a collection of thousands of bleak concrete slabs of varying sizes that pull you deeper into a disorienting maze evocative of the terrifying journey to the death camps. But when you least expect it, a small tree will appear, or a lighted path out, like Steven Spielberg's girl in a red coat in "Schindler's List." A couple hundred yards south is the unmarked site of Hitler's bunker. In order to prevent visits by neo-Nazis, the exact location is undisclosed, but it's somewhere between a Subway sandwich shop and a Starbucks. From militarism to capitalism. That's progress of sorts.