Senator Obama will be in Berlin later this month for what will no doubt be one of the important tests of his campaign. So far the controversy has been over whether he will speak in front of the Brandenburg Gate, a backdrop for giants — Reagan spoke there — and a symbol, today, of our victory in the Cold War. But who will be with him? Too bad it couldn’t be George Meany, Jay Lovestone, and Irving Brown.

Those leaders of the free trade union movement are long since gone, and more’s the pity. They were intimately involved in setting the stage for President Kennedy’s triumphant visit to the divided city of Berlin in June of 1963. That is the trip at which Kennedy famously declared, “Wherever there are men still enslaved, I am not free.” And issued his even more famous greeting, “Ich bin ein Berliner.”

If Mr. Obama, who is often compared to Kennedy, wants to understand the milieu in which the 35th president made his visit, one book he could read is “A Covert Life,” Ted Morgan’s biography of Jay Lovestone. Once head of the American communist party, Lovestone came over to America’s side in the late 1920s and vowed to bring down the Soviet Union. And, historians will reckon, played an outsized role in the effort that succeeded.

Lovestone was given a cubicle in New York in the offices of the International Ladies Garment Workers, and after World War II, he sent a young organizer, Irving Brown of the AFL, to Europe. It was Lovestone and Brown, under the overall leadership of George Meany, who organized the free trade union movement — meaning the anti-communist trade union movement — on the continent and beyond. Their work allowed the Marshall Plan to land its aid to liberated Europe and paved the way for the rise of Solidarity in Poland.

It was in March of 1963, according to Mr. Morgan’s biography of the anti-communist leader, that Lovestone learned of Kennedy’s plan to visit Germany in the summer and that his stop at Berlin would be on the opening day of the convention of the Germany Building Trades Union. He sent, Mr. Morgan reports, a memo to Meany suggesting both Meany and Kennedy address the convention.

Not only would it inspire the German trade union movement, he wrote, “it would also have an enormous and stirring effect on the workers, not only of West Berlin but also East Berlin and the entire Soviet zone of Germany.” Meany, according to Mr. Morgan, mentioned to JFK that he was gong to Berlin and the president responded, “I’ll arrange it so that you can fly up with me.” Meany responded, “Fine, how about coming to the convention with me.” Kennedy said. “I’ll jump in for fifteen minutes.”

And so the stage was set. A lot of urban legend exists in respect of who gave what language and advice to Kennedy. In any event, Mr. Morgan reports that both Meany and Lovestone greeted Kennedy and Berlin’s mayor, Willy Brandt, at the curb when they got to the Building Trades convention, which is where Kennedy made his remark about not being free while men are enslaved anywhere. Thousands of workers, Mr. Morgan writes, lept to their feet in a standing ovation, shouting “Kenn-ah-dee! Kenn-ah-dee!”

It was in the Rathausplatz, with, Mr. Morgan reminds, the Stars and Stripes on every lamppost, that Kennedy declared, “Today, in the world of freedom, the proudest boast is Ich bin ein Berliner.” According to Mr. Morgan, Lovestone had given Kennedy the line “I too am a Berliner,” which would be Ich auch bin ein Berliner. “But Kennedy could not pronounce the auch, so he said, ‘I am a Berliner.'”

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Who is going to play for Mr. Obama the role of Meany, Lovestone, and Irving Brown? They came up through the American labor movement with the toughness, time in grade, and seichel — a word denoting a combination of intelligence, street smarts, and wisdom — that is all too rare today. Today’s labor movement is lead by individuals who in many instances opposed the hard line combination of realism and idealism that was evinced by Meany and Lovestone and Irving Brown.

There are a number of people around Mr. Obama who understand the long lines of this pro-labor, anti-communist tradition and its role in spreading democracy abroad. But, when I called one historian, Arch Puddington of Freedom House, the biographer of Meany’s successor, Lane Kirkland, he lamented that “there’s nobody in the Democratic Party today who has the independence and stature of the AFL-CIO and George Meany so that they could tell a president certain hard truths in the face of the inevitable criticism from so-called realists and the left.”

Not that Mr. Obama isn’t going to be welcomed warmly in a Germany the labor anti-communists did so much to unite on free terms. Mr. Puddington himself was just there and found even the Christian Democratic Union, the center right party lead by Chancellor Merkel, full of interest in and enthusiasm for the senator from Illinois. But who is going to tell Mr. Obama of the consequences, for Europe and America, not to mention his campaign, if he sounds, where Kennedy vowed to stand firm during an earlier twilight war, a note of retreat instead of a note of strength and solidarity.