Leaders

by Richard Nixon

  In a sense Adenauer was the quintessential Christian Democratic statesman. He believed that tyranny of any kind—that of one nation over other nations, or that of a government over its people—was the ultimate evil because it smothered individual liberty. His dream of a united Europe, born in the ashes of World War I and reenforced by the horrors of the Nazi era, stemmed directly from this abhorrence of tyranny.

  After World War II, however, free Europe was threatened from without by forces far greater than those that had before threatened it from within. At first few understood the nature or the magnitude of the threat; Adenauer was one who did. After he came to power in 1949, he stood like a rock at the Elbe, the free world’s eastern frontier, unmoved by the Soviets’ threats and contemptuous of their sporadic, self-serving peace overtures. But he realized that Germany, unarmed and isolated, could not contain this new danger alone. During the 1950s the United States and Great Britain were steadfast in their support of the defense of Europe and the rest of the world from the Soviet Union. But France, without which an effective anti-Soviet coalition in Europe was unthinkable, had been stung three times in seventy-five years by the might of Germany, and it remained deeply skeptical of any plan for the rearming of its neighbor to the east. So Adenauer turned once again to his dream of destroying the barriers that divided Europeans from Europeans. Before, this had been an impractical, almost poetic abstraction; now it was a matter of dire necessity, and he pursued it with redoubled tenacity.

  While striving to cement a united European front against the Soviet threat, he also sought to bind Europe together with a system of economic and political interdependencies that would finally put an end to threats to the peace from within Europe. Through such initiatives as NATO, the European Coal and Steel Community, and the Franco-German friendship treaty of 1963, this was achieved to a remarkable degree. Much of the credit goes to Konrad Adenauer.

  For over a decade Adenauer was our own Iron Curtain—a man of iron will yet infinite patience whose profound belief in Christian principles made him the West’s most effective, articulate, and consistent spokesman against what he considered to be an empire founded on godlessness and spiritual oppression. At the same time, in spite of his outward austerity and his rigorous anticommunism, he was a warm, good-humored, gentle man beloved equally by his people and his own children, a forgiving father figure for a fatherland that had been led far astray.

  In the ruins of postwar Germany, Adenauer stood out like a great cathedral. To his defeated people he was der Alte, “the old man,” a symbol of faith and perseverance in a time of national humiliation and confusion. He reassured them by conducting himself with calm, patient dignity, if also with a certain air of schoolmasterlike superiority. Against those who stood in his way, he was a conniving and ruthless political infighter. To the rest of the world he was the trusted spokesman of the new democratic Germany. Within a decade he would transform it from an international outlaw into a dependable bastion of freedom.

  Friendships between national leaders are rare. They usually meet within the swirl of events and amid the confines of protocol, immersed in history and surrounded by diplomats, aides, and translators. The specter of national self-interest that hovers over their encounters tends to inhibit friendly interaction.

  During my political career, though I had friendly meetings with many foreign leaders, I could call only a few of them personal friends. Konrad Adenauer was one of those few. Our friendship spanned fourteen years, and for each of us it continued both in office and out.

  • • •

  In the fall of 1947, I was one of nineteen members of a House of Representatives committee, chaired by Christian Herter, that visited Europe and made recommendations for implementing the Marshall Plan, which had been announced in June. Our stops in Germany were among the most sobering experiences of my life. Entire cities had been completely flattened by Allied bombers, and we found thousands of families huddled in the debris of buildings and in bunkers. There was a critical shortage of food, and thin-faced, half-dressed children approached us not to beg but to sell their fathers’ war medals or to trade them for something to eat.

  One of the other congressmen on the committee, a normally reserved conservative southerner, was so moved by the sight of the children he met during one of our stops that he gave them all of his soap and candy and the sweater he was wearing. He told us later, “The last piece I had I gave to a little girl of about ten who was holding a baby that was about a year and a half old. And do you know what she did with that chocolate? She didn’t eat it. She very carefully put it in the mouth of the baby and told the baby what it was and let the baby eat it. When she did that I just couldn’t help myself. I went back into the train and got everything I had and gave it to the kids.”

  In Washington, Congress had been considering whether to give war bonuses to our World War II veterans; in Essen, I met a miner who was living in a cellar with his wife and twenty-two-year-old son. Though the son had lost a leg in battle, he received no pension or benefits at all because his disability was not considered severe enough.

  During a visit to a coal mine we met workers who saved the watery, meatless soup they were given for lunch so they could take it home and divide it among their families. Germany’s coal mines were producing far less than before the war with the same number of workers, because the men were weakened by hunger and malnutrition.

  Still, the children who refused to beg and the men who shared what little they had demonstrated to me that Adenauer was right when he declared in late 1945 that the German people were “bowed low, but . . . unbroken.”

  The American military occupation authorities, led by General Lucius Clay, assured us that the Germans indeed had the strength of spirit they would need to recover. What was missing so far, Clay said, was leadership. Germany had lost a whole generation of potential leaders during the war, and thousands more had been disqualified from leadership positions because of links with the Nazis. He told us that Germany would have to develop an entirely new crop of leaders for both the public and private sectors; those from the wartime and prewar eras would not do. What was needed above all was a strong national leader, dedicated to democratic principles, who could guide his people back into the family of free nations and at the same time protect them from the new danger looming in the east.

  Clay was right about the kind of leader Germany needed, but wrong in assuming that such a leader could not come from the prewar ranks.

  • • •

  Konrad Adenauer was born in 1876 to a father who was a court clerk in Cologne and a mother about whom little is known other than that Konrad’s father gave up a promising career in the Prussian army to marry her. Both parents were hardworking and religious. Konrad was raised in the Catholic Church and remained devoutly religious all his life.

  His childhood was strict and austere, but also secure and loving. The family had very little money. One year it was so scarce that the children were allowed to choose whether the family would go without meat for several Sunday dinners so there would be enough money for a Christmas tree and candles. Konrad and the others opted for the Christmas tree.

  Though he did well in school, his father told him at first that the family could not afford to send him to college. Konrad accepted the ruling with inner disappointment but outward equanimity and took a job as a bank clerk. But when his father saw how miserable he was after two weeks on the job, he squeezed the domestic budget further so the boy could go to college, where he studied law. Konrad knew that his education meant sacrifice for his family, and he applied himself ferociously to his studies. To increase his study time, he sometimes kept himself awake at night by putting his feet in buckets of cold water.

  Young Konrad’s tenacity was matched by his audacity. Two years after graduation he went to work in a law firm owned by a leading member of Cologne’s Center party, the conservative Catholic party and forerunner of Adenauer’s own Christian Democratic Union. One day in 1906, the twenty-nine-year
-old Adenauer learned that his employer, a man named Kausen, planned to appoint a young judge to a seat on the Cologne city council. He marched straight to Kausen’s office. “Why not take me?” he demanded. “I’m sure I’m just as good as the other fellow.” This took guts and it also took self-assurance, two qualities Adenauer consistently displayed throughout his career. In fact Adenauer was a good lawyer and a hard worker, and in claiming to be as good as the other man he was probably absolutely right. Kausen gave him the seat, and Adenauer began a political career that would last for fifty-seven years.

  • • •

  A photograph of the young Adenauer shows him on an outing in the country with four friends. The children are buried up to their chins in a haystack, and the other youngsters are all grinning mischievously. Konrad’s face bears a stern, somber expression reenforced by deep shadows under his cheekbones and his mouth. But he is waving at the camera with his left hand, which pokes out just above the top of the haystack. This was typical of Adenauer: Though displaying a studied reserve and detachment, he could also enjoy himself.

  Adenauer was seventy-seven when I first met him on his state visit to Washington in 1953, and his impassive face by then was finely and evenly lined, the wrinkles resembling the thin furrows water makes through sand. While it had the same detached quietude, it was not the same face as the one in the haystack photograph. When he was forty-one, his driver fell asleep and hit a tram. With characteristic stoicism Adenauer pulled himself from the wreckage and calmly walked to the hospital, his face covered with blood. The driver, only mildly injured, made the trip by stretcher.

  Adenauer suffered broken cheekbones, along with other facial injuries, and the accident left him looking even more severe. Many writers later described his face as resembling that of a Chinese mandarin. It was an oddly apt comparison; the old bromide about Oriental inscrutability was completely appropriate to Adenauer. John J. McCloy, who served with great distinction as America’s first High Commissioner to Germany after World War II, put it another way. He told me, “He had the strong, stoic face of an American Indian. He looked like Geronimo.”

  Because of his outward seriousness, Adenauer was thought to be humorless, even coldhearted, by many of his critics and even by supporters who did not know him well. But although he was not a punster or a backslapper, beneath the surface Adenauer was a deeply compassionate man with a subtle, refined sense of humor.

  Adenauer rarely wasted his energies on unimportant issues or lost causes. Similarly he usually reserved his humor for some practical purpose. In 1959 President Eisenhower gave a reception at the White House for the foreign dignitaries who had come to Washington for John Foster Dulles’s funeral. There Adenauer saw me standing with Soviet Foreign Minister Gromyko, who had flown in from the stalemated Geneva conference on Germany and Berlin. He walked over to us, and I commented to him lightheartedly that many people claimed Gromyko and I looked alike.

  The Chancellor laughed and said, “That is very true, and as a result I have a suggestion for breaking the impasse at Geneva. You get on Gromyko’s plane and go back to Geneva and let Gromyko stay here and be the Vice President. Then, I am sure, we’ll be able to break the logjam.” Even the usually dour Russian joined in the laughter.

  While Adenauer’s remark was facetious, he had made a telling point about the Soviets’ intransigence at Geneva. Many years later, after he had left office, he used humor to indicate his disappointment with the political acumen of his successor, Ludwig Erhard. Settling down one day for an interview with a reporter, he asked, “Shall we discuss serious politics, or Chancellor Erhard?”

  • • •

  In 1917, while Adenauer was recuperating from his auto accident, a pair of city officials visited the Black Forest sanatorium where he was staying. The position of Lord Mayor had become vacant and the city council wanted Adenauer to take it. The delegation’s mission was to involve Adenauer in a conversation about municipal affairs to determine whether the accident had scattered his brains. He quickly figured out what his visitors were up to, however, and told them, “Gentlemen, it’s only outwardly that my head isn’t quite right.” The officials laughed and offered him the job on the spot. World War I was drawing to an end. Cologne was in shambles. Adenauer accepted immediately.

  At first the forty-one-year-old Oberbürgermeister had his hands full finding enough food and shelter for the residents and returning soldiers and keeping the population under control in the political vacuum left by the nation’s defeat and the Kaiser’s abdication. But as life returned to normal, Adenauer undertook a grand plan to restore Cologne’s ancient cultural and architectural splendor. He told a friend gleefully, “Times of political catastrophe are especially suitable for new creative ventures!” Already his attention was straying beyond Germany’s borders. He viewed his city as a new link between Germany and Western Europe.

  Even then he sometimes displayed both ingenuity and guile in getting colleagues to go along with his schemes. In 1926 he wanted to build a suspension bridge across the Rhine, but a majority of the city council wanted an arch bridge instead. He sought out the Communist councilmen and told them that suspension bridges were what gave Leningrad its rare and special beauty. Adenauer knew practically nothing about Leningrad or its bridges, but he knew a great deal about human nature and the warm spot German Communists had in their hearts for revolutionary Russia. He got his suspension bridge—and also earned a reputation as a skillful political operator.

  At around the same time Adenauer turned down a chance to become Chancellor. During the Weimar Republic, Chancellors stayed in office an average of only seven months before their legislative coalitions crumbled. The leaders of the Center party thought Adenauer might be forceful enough to make a government last, and in 1926 they invited him to form one.

  He was tempted. But his poker face hid a shrewd politician who steered clear of lost causes. It was not that he was unwilling to take risks. But he did follow a practice of carefully weighing the chances of success, combining close analysis with a finely tuned political instinct. After going to Berlin and testing the political climate, he concluded that the chance of beating the odds was not worth it. So he declined the offer and returned to Cologne.

  The mounting economic and social pressures that were then making effective government so difficult in Germany might have overcome even Konrad Adenauer. But while his decision is understandable from a personal standpoint, I have often wondered how profoundly history might have been changed if this enormously capable political leader had become Chancellor at that time. Hitler might have met his nemesis before he seized power and brought such tragedy to Germany and the world.

  Three and a half years later Adenauer was elected to a second twelve-year term as Lord Mayor. Then fifty-three, he expected to serve it out and retire. But when Hitler became Chancellor, the Nazis did not want leaders of Adenauer’s national stature and independent mind in office. He made his stubborn independence plain from the outset. Within a few weeks he either snubbed or resisted Hitler three times. First he vocally but unsuccessfully opposed the Nazis’ abolition of the Prussian state parliament, of which Adenauer had been a member since 1917. Later, on a campaign trip before the March 1933 elections, Hitler visited Cologne. Adenauer pointedly refused to meet him at the airport. Two days later, on the morning of Hitler’s Cologne speech, he ordered city workmen to remove Nazi banners from a bridge over the Rhine and sent a contingent of policemen along to protect them while they worked.

  After the elections the Nazis commanded absolute power, and Adenauer became persona non grata. He was taunted in public. Soon he was dismissed as Lord Mayor for imaginary crimes against the people of Cologne and driven from the city. While the Nazis regarded him with hostility, however, he was not high on their list of people to be eliminated. He was arrested during the Night of the Long Knives in 1934, but released unharmed when the bloodbath was over. For most of the remaining Nazi years he was left alone to tend his roses and his family at his ho
me in Rhöndorf, near Cologne.

  Most, but not all, for in 1944 he had a close brush with death. He was apparently invited to join Carl Goerdeler’s courageous but ill-fated plot to kill Hitler, but turned the conspirators down after figuring the odds and deciding the plan would probably fail. After the assassination attempt did fail, he was arrested and imprisoned. He escaped transfer to Buchenwald by feigning illness. He then slipped from the hospital with the help of a friend who was in the Luftwaffe. Eventually the Gestapo found him hiding in a mill in the forest forty miles from Cologne and arrested him again. The Nazis finally let him go in November 1944 after his son Max, an officer in the German army, went to Berlin to plead for his father’s release. Adenauer was at home in Rhöndorf when the Americans took Cologne the following spring.

  Despite this drama the most significant period of Adenauer’s life during the Nazi years was the quietest. When he was driven from Cologne in the spring of 1933, he left his family at home and entered a Benedictine abbey fifteen miles from the Rhine. He hoped that in the abbey he could at least temporarily escape the attention of the Nazis. The abbot was an old school friend. Adenauer stayed there almost a year, spending most of his time meditating, wandering in the woods, and reading. The abbey had a good history collection, and he devoured book after book.

  Before Hitler took power, Adenauer was the prosperous, powerful “King of Cologne” and the stern but affectionate patriarch of a growing family. Now his power was gone, his family was separated from him, and he was quite literally living a life of monastic asceticism. Only his faith remained. As he reflected on the perils a people courted when it surrendered to militant nationalism and tyranny, he began to dwell with increasing intensity on his lifelong dream of a new European political order in which liberty and Christian principles would come first and national power and identity second.