Adenauer and the President

...President Kennedy took office without strong feelings on the German problem and with few important preconceptions, save perhaps one: West Germany, now the rich man of Europe, should bear an increased share of the common Western burden in providing longterm capital assistance to the less developed countries of Asia and Africa...

...There is no evidence that Adenauer lost faith in either one...

...Hugh Gaitskell had a similar experience...

...There were some reservations about details on the German side, but no fundamental objections...

...At the moment, Adenauer's power to delay serious negotiations is demonstrable...

...The President feels that neither Adenauer nor de Gaulle has a warrant to criticize the United States, or to block forever his Administration's attempts to reach a modus vivendi on Berlin...

...President Kennedy had first mentioned the idea in his interview last autumn with Khrushchev's son-in-law, Alexei Adzhubei...

...Between the President and Adenauer—already Mayor of Cologne the year Kennedy was born— a first-name relationship would, of course, be incongrous...

...The root of Adenauer's present insecurity, and his recent public expressions of doubt about the wisdom of American policy, can be traced back to the Presidential campaign of 1960...

...He and Secretary Rusk get along well, for example, with Gerhard Schroeder, the new West German Foreign Minister, who belongs to Adenauer's Christian Democratic party...

...The old man sensed that the new Administration—with young, untried men in high places—was bound to re-examine old assumptions and seek to devise new solutions for problems long unsolved: including, perhaps, the problems of Germany and Berlin...

...And Der Alte's misgivings about the new order in Washington can only have been reinforced by the fact that the Kennedy Administration struck a sympathetic chord in the Social Democratic Opposition...

...Yet the nub of the matter was something else again...

...The deliberate leakage of a confidential American memorandum by someone close to the Chancellor, with or without his explicit approval, merely brought them to public attention...

...his place in the history books was assured...

...It may have been their lack of practical experience in the uses of power that troubled the aged Chancellor...

...Adenauer, worried about this, finally sent his personal diplomatic factotum, Felix von Eckhart, to the United States in mid-campaign to catechize the Kennedy people on the dangers of endorsing the Oder-Neisse line in a bid for Polish-American votes...

...The main proposal, to establish an international authority that would control the access routes to Berlin, had been chewed over in formal inter-allied consultations for six months...

...companion offers to exchange non-aggression pledges between the North Atlantic alliance and the Warsaw Pact powers, and to establish East-West German committees to handle specific technical matters, these were designed as lagniappe...

...The promise was honored even though Richard Nixon, under no similar suspicion or restraint, said in a Buffalo campaign speech at the Polish Union Hall: "all Poles in Poland as well as abroad are united in their determination to defend the new western frontier...

...If there is a full-blown crisis of confidence between the Schomburg Palace and the White House—and there is good reason to suppose that it has been exaggerated on both sides of the Atlantic —the suspicions and resentments have been building up for many months...

...The Chancellor could see the day when his hard-won veto power over American policy in Europe would be revoked...

...The Russians chose to ridicule the access authority plan in public at the outset...

...Willy Brandt found an open door at the White House on his last Washington visit and quickly engaged Kennedy in a long, freewheeling conversation...

...Konrad Heinrich von Brentano, former West German Foreign Minister and now Christian Democratic leader of the Bundestag, did not help matters when he arrived in Washington in the midst of the hullaballoo...

...But the absolute veto the old man used to wield has weakened, thanks chiefly to his own capricious and contradictory behavior...

...Der Alte" speaks of Kennedy, with a certain icy detachment, as "der junge Herr...

...Yet Adenauer continued to harbor doubts about the new men in Washington...

...It was, in fact, an outgrowth of Bonn's original suggestion to internationalize the Berlin corridor...

...He has pointed out, with some feeling, that Washington bears the main responsibility for defending Berlin and must, therefore, have a voice in deciding allied policy...

...Younger German leaders also sensed that the Adenauer era was ending...

...But Washington has reason to suspect it was done with the Chancellor's knowledge for the express purpose of embarrassing the President and squashing the American package of proposals before they could be presented to the Soviet Union...

...energetic and intelligent, certainly...

...Despite Bonn's disclaimers, the package's contents were not sprung on the Germans without warning...

...With Dulles dead and Dwight Eisenhower about to yield the White House, Adenauer was not alone among foreign statesmen in hoping for a Nixon victory...

...Nixon had a double advantage—a familiar face and a commitment to familiar policies...

...The old man alone could afford the political risks of truthtelling: He would never fight another election...

...These actions were by no means intended as marks of partiality toward the Socialist Opposition...

...Elie Abel covers the State Department as a correspondent for the National Broadcasting Company...

...But the younger German leaders were aware that the next Chancellor would almost certainly have to tell the German people some unpleasant truths about the diminishing prospects of unification, the permanence of the Oder-Neisse frontier, and even the unmentioned other Germany...

...But the junior Senator from Massachusetts had advocated American aid to Poland and worked to amend the Battle Act...

...Only when all these elements are taken into account can the misunderstandings of the past several weeks be seen in proper perspective...

...During much of this period Adenauer was resting at his villa on Lake Como, out of direct contact with Washington...

...He obtained from Kennedy a promise to keep OderNeisse out of the campaign...

...At the height of the Bonn-Washington tempest this month, too, the Social Democratic party's chief spokesman on defense and foreign policy, Fritz Erler, enjoyed a frank, friendly discussion with the President...

...Kennedy's public record showed no pronounced views on the German question...

...He might have been spared the humiliation if various younger aspirants—notably Franz Joseph Strauss of Adenauer's own Christian Democratic party and Erich Mende of the Free Democrats—had joined forces to bar his return to office...

...Eckhart saw Adlai Stevenson, Chester Bowles and Archibald Cox among others, then talked with Kennedy himself...

...Washington's central objective was to safeguard Berlin —its access routes, its livelihood and the continued presence of allied garrisons in the city—by putting together a package the Russians might one day accept...

...Ambassador Llewellyn Thompson and Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko in Moscow...

...Yet there was no reason to assume that Bonn would fail to keep him up to date on every development in the Rusk-Gromyko talks...

...John F. Kennedy, seen through Adenauer's rheumy eye, is a less-than-reassuring figure: an ally perforce...

...The President happens to be more comfortable with mortal men of his own generation than with national monuments such as Adenauer and de Gaulle...

...The early crises over Cuba and Laos inevitably deepened his doubts...

...But it was discussed seriously more than once in private conversations between U.S...

...When the Chancellor lost his Bundestag majority in last September's elections, he was forced to patch up a coalition with the Free Democrats on somewhat humiliating terms...

...The President has now agreed to wait for Bonn's counterproposals before putting a presumably modified plan to the Russians...

...Bonn finds it convenient to shrug off responsibility for the leak...

...but a man impossibly young and not altogether reliable...

...Before Secretary Rusk took up the probing with Gromyko at Geneva last March, he drove to Lausanne for advance consultations with Foreign Minister Schroeder...

...Throughout this drawn-out probing operation, the Germans were kept fully informed...

...Mit Foster hat dat immer grossartig geklappt" ("With Foster things always went beautifully"), the Chancellor fondly recalls, in his ripe Rhineland dialect...

...With the help of a Chicago public relations firm, Bretano persuaded a number of Republican Senators to read into the record speeches questioning the President's steadfastness on Berlin...

...Despite his recent turnabout, Adenauer's virtual repudiation of the understandings Schroeder worked out with Rusk, both at Lausanne and later at the NATO meeting in Athens, have not been forgotten here...

...But the bitter talk coming out of Bonn the past few weeks about the Americans being ready to sell out their German allies has had its effect in Washington...

...As for Secretary of State Dean Rusk and McGeorge Bundy, the President's chief assistant in foreign and military policy-making, both were wholehearted believers in the key Truman-Eisenhower decisions of the postwar years, which had helped lift West Germany out of the wreckage and transform the recent enemy into a favored ally...

...As for the U.S...

...Nixon was in good company: Charles de Gaulle had endorsed the Oder-Neisse line, without quibble...

...These facts must inevitably influence the attitude of the Western powers...