Germany and the Coin of the Realm
SCHORR, DANIEL
Washington Notebook BY DANIEL SCHORR Germany and the Coin of the Realm East Germany's first free election on March 18 was probably its last. It was a sort of rehearsal for an...
...You have nothing to lose but your Cheneys...
...The victorious nations of World War II had planned for a unified Germany, temporarily divided into four occupation zones...
...In rallies and on television, in half a million posters and 20 million leaflets, West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl had promised a monetary bailout and a fast track to unification...
...One searches for some analogy to help explain the paradox of Gorbachev, who, five years after coming to power as chief of the Communist Party, is moving away from the Party, creating an authoritarian executive presidency in the name of fostering democracy...
...PresidentBushsaidtheU.S...
...But the Evans-Novak column, virtually pointing to the source of the tendentious story, concluded: "Defense Secretary Dick Cheney has warned that since nobody can predict where Gorbachev's revolution really is going, the United States must be prepared for anything...
...In fact, according to authoritative sources, no pistols were drawn...
...For the first time in the lives of most East Germans, they marked ballots instead of simply folding them...
...As the Cold War got under way in 1948, the Western Allies, over strenuous Soviet objections, introduced a currency reform in the three Western zones, replacing the near-worthless reichsmark with a new Deutsche mark...
...Oh, yeah...
...But the East Germans voted much like citizens of older democracies, putting their ballots where the money was...
...As with the mining of Nicaragua's harbors and the shipment of arms to Iran...
...Kohl seemed to be acting with the same insensitivity to international sentiment that he exhibited in 1985, when he insisted that President Ronald Reagan visit the Bitburg military cemetery, in a state where an election was to be held, after it became known that Nazi S.S...
...It was a sort of rehearsal for an all-German election, with parties and candidates that will now be familiar...
...While Representative Dan Rostenkowski of Illinois, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, proposed defense cuts as part of a deficit-reduction package and the New York Times reported Bush ready to retreat on military spending, Secretary Cheney continued to fight his rear-guard battle...
...Bush seems an obvious candidate for Caller ID service...
...Roosevelt, stretching his constitutional powers to lift a nation out of depression...
...To curb the abuse of power, he assumes power...
...One wondered whether somebody had neglected to purge the Cold War policy statements from the computer bank...
...Is this a Lincoln, asserting himself in order to preserve the Union...
...As part of this Pentagon last stand, columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak came up with a lurid tale of a "missile crisis...
...Soviet guards, they said, drew their pistols at the Votkinsk missile plant to foil American inspection of SS-25 intercontinental missiles to make sure they were not SS-20 intermediate missiles, banned by the INF treaty...
...troops were buried there...
...The reform of 1948 was the prelude to the West German economic miracle...
...One must say amen to a penetrating article by Michael Oreskes in the New York Times concluding that "domestic pohtics has become so shallow, mean and even meaningless that it is failing to produce the ideas and leadership needed to guide the United States in a rapidly changing world...
...More than 93 per cent of the eligible voters turned out...
...But that is what this secrecy-obsessed Chief Executive would probably say if the whole thing were a CIA operation...
...Budget cutters of the world, unite...
...Stalin responded by blockading West Berlin...
...But the West German election is not until next December...
...Yet, he felt a need to show "compassion and understanding...
...For the first time they enjoyed the privacy of voting booths—borrowed for the occasion from the West...
...The picture was somewhat oversimplified...
...That's how it is in a young democracy, where voting is an exciting new experience...
...When the House Democratic Leader Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri asserted that the Bush Administration should act more vigorously to help emerging democracies in Eastern Europe—and aid the Soviet Union, as suggested by Czechoslovak President Vaclav Havel —he was met with a deafening silence among Democrats and a slashing attack from Republicans like Senator Alan K. Simpson of Wyoming, undoubtedly encouraged bythe White House...
...It swept away the urgings of the New Forum reformers, the founding fathers of the revolution last fall, to preserve some East German identity...
...Meanwhile, the promised monetary union, by easing East German economic insecurity and fears that savings and pensions would evaporate, proved to be powerful medicine, producing a victory for the Alliance for Germany, led by the Christian Democrats, and a setback for the Social Democrats...
...If it had been the CIA, some might counter, the Administration by law would have had to inform Congressional intelligence committees in a "timely" fashion...
...It was presumably also compassion that prompted the President to accept a hoax call from someone represented as Iran's President Hashemi Rafsanjani...
...Secretary of Defense Richard B. Cheney and CIA Director William H. Webster found themselves in public disagreement about the ebbing of the Soviet military threat, and Cheney said, on television, that it was Webster's obligation to exercise "a little more restraint" in his intelligence estimates in the interest of supporting the Administration's defense budget...
...it is creating something that never was...
...But it was clear that Gorbachev, although he emphasized economic reform in his inaugural address, faced separatism among the non-Russian republics—and, indeed, in Russia, too—as the most immediate test of his regime...
...Gorbachev does not fit the emperor's clothes...
...Responding to domestic political concerns—appeasing some 10 million expelled Germans and seeking to avoid a defection of 50,000-100,000Christian Democratic Union voters that might bring the extremist Republicans up to the 5 per cent threshold needed for representation in Parliament—led to what turned out to be a first-class boner...
...This time the Chancellor finally backed down, but not before Poland had won a seat at the unification talks devoted to the discussion of borders, turning the Two plus Four into 2 + 4 Vi...
...Even if counterproductive...
...His seemingly generous bid for a friendly takeover was an offer that was hard to refuse...
...Where is Admiral JohnM...
...Lithuania's Parliament, meeting in a hurry-up session to declare the Baltic Republic's independence less than a week after the election there, presented the seriocomic picture of trying to keep one step ahead of the sheriff— of seeking to escape before President Mikhail S. Gorbachev obtained from the full Soviet Parliament the extraordinary powers that he would wield in an effort to veto the declaration of independence...
...The President told Jim Angle of National Public Radio that "dramatic meetings" with families of hostages might be unwise, because they could suggest to the kidnappers "more advantage in holding the hostages than in releasing them...
...From the Bush Basket • President Bush met with Peggy Say on March 17, the fifth anniversary of the kidnapping of her brother, Terry Anderson, in Beirut...
...Thus, the reuniting of the German currency represents the initial major step toward German reunion, just as the dividing of that currency introduced the division of Germany...
...The Soviet's problem is not recovery...
...No Change in the United States I am conscious of having gone a long way in a recital of changes in Europe without having mentioned America's role...
...The Bush Administration, offering a measly 10 per cent, or $300 million, to participate in a European Development Bank, presumed to demand a veto and restrictions on loans to the Soviet Union...
...There is some irony in the fact that Germany's partition seems to be ending the way it started—with the coin of the realm...
...With everything from Lithuania's electric supply to border police under Moscow's control, it would obviously take more than a flag, an anthem and a music teacher president to make the Lithuanians really free...
...The Gorbachev Paradox In the redrawing of the map of Europe, Germany has stood out as the one pending remarriage amid many threatened divorces...
...What was involved was an arcane dispute about whether an X-ray machine employed by the American inspectors went beyond the provisions of the agreement, possibly revealing more about the SS-25s than the Soviets deemed necessary to show they were not SS-20s...
...Government had "absolutely" nothing to do with a fire which was reported to have damaged the Rabat chemical plant in Libya...
...There came no rebuke from the President, who—in announcing in December 1988 that Webster would be retained—had stated that "the director of Central Intelligence should be in the intelligence business, not the policy business...
...Moves toward political unification— the so-called Two-plus-Four meetings of the two Germanies and the four powers that won—have proceeded more slowly, being delayed for a while by Chancellor Kohl's waffling on the permanency of German postwar borders...
...But the Soviet Union is not a freely constituted association, nor is Gorbachev a popularly elected president...
...Poindexter when we need him...
...For passengers on a foundering ship, the yearning for a safe haven overcame misgivings about the speed of the voyage...
...Maybe the only fitting analogy can be found in Russian history—Peter the Great, the enlightened tyrant...
...Perhaps Napoleon, using his imperial powers to create a new order...
...The buyout of the depreciated East German mark may be, for West Germans, the prelude to inflation and/or higher taxes...
Vol. 73 • March 1990 • No. 5
