Did JFK Really Tell A Crowd He Was Proud To Be A Jelly Donut?

Over 250 years of American history, there have been plenty of legendary presidential gaffes. There was the time Gerald Ford stated that there was no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, instantly torpedoing his foreign policy cred; there was the time Ronald Reagan's joke caught on a hot mic threatened to turn the Cold War hot; and who could ever forget George W. Bush's "fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again" moment? But one of the most famous gaffes in presidential history wasn't a gaffe at all. It was a serious, well-received bit of rhetoric that, over the years, turned into a joke based on a word for a jelly donut.

The story goes that John F. Kennedy, delivering a speech in 1963 to a crowd in West Berlin, tried to show solidarity by saying in German "ich bin ein Berliner", or "I am a Berliner" — only to be met with laughter from the audience. He then learned that "Berliner" referred not to a person from Berlin, but to a jelly donut — a humiliating mistake, and surely the worst thing that could possibly happen to John F. Kennedy in 1963.

This is, of course, an absurd fiction. For one thing, JFK would obviously be a Boston Cream donut (not to be confused with a Bavarian), not jelly. For another, nobody in Germany would have taken "Berliner" to mean "jelly donut."

It's true that, in Germany, there is a popular variety of jelly donut called a "Berliner," that is not too dissimilar from the jelly-filled Hannukah treat, Sufganiyot. The name originated from a legend about a Berlin baker-turned-soldier making donuts for his regiment in the Prussian War. But that isn't the dessert's only name, and the people who lived in and around Berlin didn't call it that. The popular term in Berlin was, and remains, "Pfannkucken;" other places in Germany and Austria call them "krapfen." In any case, "Berliner" also refers to a person from Berlin, and it was obvious from the context of the speech which definition Kennedy was using. To put it another way: If someone gave a speech in New York about a war hero, nobody would assume they were talking about a decorated submarine sandwich. (That said, the hero/sub/hoagie is the most American sandwich, so why not pin some medals on one?)

Kennedy's speech, a rousing expression of solidarity with a divided city, was well-received at the time, and is still remembered as one of his very best moments of oration. The urban legend of this whole jelly donut debacle actually first appeared in a spy novel, "Berlin Game," by Len Deighton, published in 1983. Although the novel's narrator is intentionally unreliable, the New York Times Book Review took the anecdote at face value, and the story appears to have snowballed from there.