The "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech was delivered to a crowd of West Berliners and was obviously tailored specifically for them. Kennedy's famous line wouldn't have gone over so well if he'd stood up in front of a crowd of people in Iowa and said, "I'm a Berliner."

It would have been bizarre, and even with the idea of how all of mankind is connected, it's had to imagine a Iowan applauding an American president talking about how he's from Berlin…when he obviously isn't.

However, the speech was also meant to make the news. It was videotaped and broadcast far beyond Berlin. The speech is short and easy to make into easily digestible sound bites for worldwide consumption. Kennedy wanted the world's attention focused on the Berlin Wall: the speech was meant to help that cause, and it did an insanely good job of achieving that goal. The speech received a very positive reaction from the non-communist world.

While Kennedy gave similar speeches before and after "Ich bin ein Berliner" on the same subject, this speech contained his harshest criticism of communism, mainly because he went off-script. Kennedy's aides and speechwriters were nervous that he'd gone too far in "Ich bin ein Berliner" and perhaps worsened relations with the USSR.

Remember that anything that made the relationship between the U.S. and the USSR worse brought the world closer to nuclear war (remember that itty-bitty crisis in Cuba?), so they can be forgiven for being a bit paranoid about a few off-the-cuff remarks.

The speech is a snapshot of what Cold War tensions were like in the early 1960s. While its words don't really apply to today's politics (now that the Cold War is over and the U.S. and Russia have different reasons for not liking each other), its most famous phrase is often repeated.

Kennedy's sentiment about all being connected and thus all being Berliners is also definitely still used, although in other contexts. Listen to politicians after a crisis and you can still hear, "Today we are all [insert name of location here]" repeated over and over again.