The setting sun against the Victory Column provided a dramatic backdrop for the 44th US President-to-be's keynote foreign policy speech and CNN's Chief International Correspondent was there to capture the moment.
The Berlin police reckoned a crowd of 200,000 had amassed at the foot of the Victory Column, but given that I was 20m from the front of the lectern, a seemingly short distance, but the intervening space was a mass of humanity and given the time it took to the crowd to disperse after the speech was over, I would say 200,000 is a conservative estimate.
BO's speech centred around the need for global cooperation to tackle the problems of the world and he drew parallels with the Berlin airlift that saw Americans, Germans and others engage in a major collaborative effort that required countries who had recently been at war with one another to trust each other. The scale of the Berlin airlift was immense and its success is testament to what can be achieved when countries put humanity before anything else. The world needs humanity to be prioritised and in Barack Obama, the world may have found the person who can attain the required global consensus.
The audacity of hope is a beautiful thing to behold.
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