Bush Proposes Berlin as 2004 Olympics Host

VALLETTA, Malta —  President Bush proposed Saturday that the United States and the Soviet Union jointly support a bid by Berlin to host the Summer Olympics in 2004.

Such a move would be fraught with symbolism.

In the darkest days of the Cold War, Berlin was the object of some of the superpowers’ most dangerous confrontations, including the 1948 Berlin blockade and the Allied airlift that broke it. Also, the last time Berlin hosted the Olympics was in 1936, when Hitler used the Games in an effort to showcase his Third Reich.

And returning the Games to Berlin would be a significant spur to the process of reknitting the divided city.

Bush made the suggestion in the initial session of his two-day summit meeting with Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev here, aides said.

They said there was no immediate Soviet response.

Bush did not specify whether the Olympics should be hosted by West Berlin, Communist East Berlin, the two zones together--or whether he was thinking that, by the turn of the century, it might be a reunited city within a reunified Germany.

Some West German officials have suggested that the two Berlins could jointly host the Games, even if Germany’s former capital remains divided.

At the 1936 Olympics, while Hitler sought to vaunt the power of his Third Reich, the great black American sprinter, Jesse Owens, won several gold medals--confounding Nazi theories of white supremacy.