Leaders

by Richard Nixon

  • • •

  Adenauer was sometimes compared with Charlemagne, the towering figure who through force of personality and faith united Europe briefly under one Christian empire in the late eighth and early ninth centuries. The comparison was apt in more than one sense. Both Charlemagne and Adenauer were big men physically. Both, though men of profound faith, also enjoyed the good life. And while both were known as men of action rather than as great thinkers, each was enthralled by the same dream and possessed of the means and ability to make it real.

  Charlemagne’s empire was divided among his three grandsons in the ninth century. Since then France and Germany, the two largest parts of the divided empire, have periodically been embroiled in hostility. During his years in the wilderness, as he studied and reflected, Adenauer grew increasingly convinced that the people of Europe could once again be brought together under friendly governments united in their commitment to Christian values. After the war his priority became a free Europe united against Soviet despotism.

  Ironically this dream of unity had a dark side. After World War II many Germans thought he was not really interested in reuniting the divided German nation. When Adenauer faced toward Western Europe, they saw him as turning his back on his seventeen million countrymen in East Germany. To an extent this was true.

  Adenauer was born in the Rhineland, part of the “middle kingdom” between medieval France and Germany. Many Rhinelanders are born with a kernel of ambivalence: They are both German and a little French at once. Some of his critics charged that he was more pro-Rhineland, or even more pro-France, than he was pro-Germany. While his patriotism was never legitimately in doubt, it is true that his heart always remained in the Rhineland and that he had none of the Prussian German’s antipathy toward the French.

  John McCloy was a close personal friend and admirer of the Chancellor. Once in talking with me he used a quotation from Goethe to describe Adenauer: “Two souls dwell, alas! in my breast.” One of these souls was German, the other European. One soul loved the fatherland, the other was repelled by its episodes of militarism and totalitarianism. Adenauer wanted the West German capital located in the Rhineland; this was one way to disassociate his new Germany from its Prussian past. Bonn is closer to Paris than it is to Berlin.

  Ultimately Adenauer’s distaste for Prussian Germany probably caused his downfall. When the East Germans began building the Berlin Wall in August 1961, he did not travel to Berlin for nine days, a delay that earned him loud and partially justified criticism. His presence at the outset of the crisis would have been a great comfort to the people of both halves of the city.

  When he finally did arrive—and was coolly received by the Berliners and their mayor, Willy Brandt—he walked determinedly toward the barbed wire fence at Potsdamer Platz and stood four or five yards away from it, staring over to the other side. East German officials jeered at him through loudspeakers, but he stood his ground. It was an impressive moment of silent defiance, but it was not enough to dispel the bitterness many West Germans felt at his not having gone sooner. In the following month’s elections, Adenauer’s CDU lost its absolute majority in the Bundestag.

  Throughout his chancellorship, though Adenauer always said he was dedicated to uniting the two Germanys, there was always uncertainty about how deeply he believed his own words. He once said that there were three kinds of Germans: the schnapps drinkers of Prussia, the beer drinkers of Bavaria, and the wine drinkers of the Rhineland. Only the Rhinelanders, he said, were sober enough to rule the rest. And there is the possibility that this shrewd politician may have been concerned that more liberal East German voters in a united German nation might have jeopardized the margin of victory that had given him the chancellorship.

  • • •

  The more fatalistic historians define a capable leader as one who manages to conform his policies to the unchangeable flow of history. Putting it simply, they believe that history makes the man rather than the other way around. According to this theory West Germany drifted toward Western Europe and away from the Communist East because of the strong current of the Cold War and the antagonism between the U.S. and the Soviets. Adenauer was simply a rudderman who could make small adjustments.

  That sort of theory is cherished by theoreticians, who deal with the abstract. It wins little respect from statesmen, who deal with the concrete and who know from experience how a leader’s decisions can change events. In fact, during those troubled early postwar years, the prospects for Franco-German rapprochement, the key to European unity, often seemed slender. Three times in less than a century the French and the Germans had slaughtered each other in bloody combat. The hatred and distrust each had for the other seemed too deep to root out. The reconciliation finally came to pass only because of Adenauer’s persistence, the confidence he inspired in other key leaders such as Schuman and de Gaulle, and the new sense of urgency created by the Soviet threat.

  At several points during the 1950s, as when the French Parliament vetoed the idea of a European army, a different German leader might have allowed Franco-German relations to drift back into hostility for another generation. Adenauer swallowed his frustration. “I believe patience is the strongest weapon in the armory of the defeated,” he once said, “and I possess a great deal of it. I can wait.”

  For a long moment after the war Europe tottered on a thin edge between alliance and isolationism. In a moment like this, when events can move in one direction as readily as another, a great leader can be the decisive element. Adenauer, with his vision of modern Europe based on the Europe that existed at the dawn of the Middle Ages, was prepared to be such a leader and executed his role perfectly.

  • • •

  After his 1953 trip Adenauer came to Washington six more times before 1961. One reason he came so often was that his talks with Dulles and President Eisenhower were unusually productive. He found the American government more consistently receptive than either Great Britain or France to his ideas about the defense of Western Europe. After the French rejected the European army in 1954, Adenauer told Dulles that he found the “best Europeans” were in the U.S.

  He was very close to Dulles, with whom he had much in common. Both were deeply religious. Both had legal backgrounds. Both were devoted to their families. Most important, both were dedicated internationalists, unabashedly committed to combatting the advance of tyranny. As Adenauer biographer Terence Prittie wrote, “Perhaps the strongest bonds which united them were their dutiful belief in God and their hatred of communism.”

  Adenauer never recognized the legitimacy of the Communist government in East Germany, which he continued to call “the Soviet zone” until the end of his life, and he did not believe the Soviets when they said they wanted an independent, unified, and neutral Germany with a democratically elected government. First, Adenauer knew the Soviets had never allowed free elections in East Germany. Second, he believed no nation in postwar Europe that chose to remain neutral would remain independent for very long. “One cannot sit between two chairs,” he said.

  At home Adenauer drew heavy criticism from opponents who insisted that he should be more responsive to the Soviets’ occasional overtures on unification. In Dulles he found reinforcement for his own strong convictions. As he wrote in his memoirs, “Dulles and I were agreed on one key principle; no concessions without concessions in return. We were accused of being obstinate and static, and the whole world wrote that we should be more flexible.”

  One day in Bonn, C. L. Sulzberger, the distinguished New York Times correspondent, asked Adenauer to name the greatest man he had ever encountered. Adenauer walked to his desk and picked up a framed photograph of Dulles taken during Dulles’s last visit to Germany in 1959. This had been the last time Adenauer had seen his friend alive.

  The Chancellor handed Sulzberger the photograph and said “There.” When Sulzberger asked why he had picked Dulles, Adenauer replied, “He thought clearly. He thought ahead, with visions of what was coming; and he kept his wor
d. He kept his promises.”

  Some critics argue that Dulles and Adenauer became so close that each hardened the other’s unreasonable inflexibility toward the Russians, and that Dulles’s personal friendship with the German leader effectively put the U.S. State Department at the service of Adenauer’s foreign policy. It is closer to the truth to say that their unique friendship grew from their complete agreement on the issues that mattered to them most, especially their nations’ best position vis-à-vis the Soviets.

  In February 1959 Dulles learned that he had incurable cancer. One of the first people he told was Adenauer. Dulles died in May, and the eighty-three-year-old Chancellor flew to Washington and marched in the funeral procession.

  Dulles’s funeral in 1959 drew dignitaries from all over the world to Washington. They came in record numbers. Some hated him; some feared him; all respected him. Adenauer was among the few who loved him.

  Like the absurd claims that the British lack a sense of humor and the Japanese cannot see straight, the idea that Germans are by nature stoic and unemotional is a myth. It has been my own experience that despite outward appearances most Germans are deeply emotional. Adenauer certainly fit this mold. Tears came to his eyes as he spoke to me about his affection and respect for Dulles. “There is no figure on the world scene who will be able to fill his shoes,” he said.

  • • •

  Just as many found Adenauer cold and unemotional, many others—seeing the straightforward, almost organic unity of his thinking and his programs—thought him to be a simple man. Austria’s able and usually perceptive Prime Minister, Bruno Kreisky, once went so far as to say that Adenauer was uncultivated and had said hardly anything. It is true that Adenauer’s speech was not peppered like MacArthur’s with literary and philosophical references. Nor was he an accomplished writer like de Gaulle and Churchill. In fact he told me that writing his memoirs was a burden that he endured only out of a sense of duty to history.

  But he was nonetheless a cultured, well-informed man. Contrary to Kreisky’s impression, he read constantly, particularly works of history; I knew this from my own conversations with him. When he went on vacation, he took along his large collection of classical recordings, of which his favorites were works by Schubert, Haydn, Beethoven, Vivaldi, and Mozart. He was well known as an accomplished amateur horticulturist. But few realized that he was also an authority on the Dutch masters. The head of Washington’s National Gallery once said admiringly that if he had to pick his own replacement, it would be Adenauer.

  The morning after Dulles’s funeral, Adenauer and I met in my office in the Capitol, and that evening Mrs. Nixon and I hosted a dinner for him at our home in Washington. In our talks Adenauer never spoke English, but I could tell that he had a considerable understanding of it. Like de Gaulle he sometimes corrected his translator when he felt that the nuance of what he had said had not been properly conveyed.

  During dinner our conversation turned to the rigors of campaigning and of international travel. Suddenly he asked me, “How well do you sleep?” I told him I found it very difficult when I had a lot on my mind. Adenauer said he had slept poorly since early in his life. I asked him what he did about it. “I take sleeping pills,” he replied. “I’ve been taking them for thirty years.”

  I asked him what he did when the pills did not work. He smiled and said, “I go to the doctor and get different ones.”

  His authorized biographer said Adenauer’s insomnia began in 1933, when he became a fugitive from the Nazis. When he was Chancellor he would rise at six, long before the rest of his family, and sit on the terrace or in his garden, listening to the birds and watching the light of the rising sun play on the tops of the Eifel Mountains. This, he claimed, made up for his sleepless nights.

  Adenauer sometimes took a pencil and paper into the bathroom with him in the morning, because he often got his best ideas while shaving. After breakfast, the morning papers, and a few moments with his family, he would emerge from his house at 9:50, walk briskly down a flight of fifty-three stone stairs and past his lilac and magnolia bushes, cheerfully greet any reporters, guards, and gardeners who might be waiting for him, and step into his limousine. Like Pope Pius XII, Adenauer liked to drive fast. He was usually at his office in Bonn in ten minutes. His neighbors could set their clocks by his precise morning routine.

  Like de Gaulle and Yoshida, Adenauer was an exceptionally devoted family man. His life was struck twice by profound personal tragedy. His first wife, Emma, died in 1916 in Cologne after a lingering illness. For months before her death Adenauer sat by her bedside at midday and during the evening, talking and reading to her until she fell asleep. In 1919, at forty-three, he married twenty-five-year-old Gussi Zinsser, a cousin of the wife of John McCloy. In 1944, when Adenauer was in hiding from the Nazis, they arrested Gussi, installed her in a cell full of prostitutes, and then brutally questioned her about where her husband was. She relented only when the authorities threatened also to jail her teen-age daughter, Libet.

  Gussi died in 1948 of leukemia, and a deeply bereaved Adenauer never married again. He raised his seven children as he had been raised himself: with strong doses of discipline and affection. One of his sons said, “Father leaves democracy at the door. He rules our family with a strong hand. If a rose tree must be transplanted, he decides when and where. If my sister wants to bake a cake, he must say yes or no. This is not unusual in Germany, you know; this is how it should be.”

  After Gussi’s death one or more of Adenauer’s children often accompanied him on his trips to the United States. His son Paul and daughter Libet were with him in 1959 when he joined Mrs. Nixon and me at dinner in our home.

  Adenauer had visited Moscow in the fall of 1955 for talks with Khrushchev, and I was preparing for my own trip in July. I had consulted with many experts on Russia—including Dulles, whom I had seen in his hospital room four days before his death—and at dinner that night I especially wanted Adenauer’s thoughts. Not surprisingly they were very similar to those of Dulles.

  Adenauer had gone to Moscow hoping to soften the Soviets’ belligerence toward the Federal Republic and perhaps to loosen their grip on East Germany. He had found Khrushchev totally intransigent on these issues, but he did obtain the release of ten thousand German POWs who had been held by the Soviets for ten years. In exchange, he agreed to diplomatic relations between the Soviet Union and West Germany.

  He undertook his mission with a sense of dread. To Adenauer the Soviet Union represented institutionalized godlessness the likes of which the world had not seen since the time of Constantine. Khrushchev’s boorishness heightened Adenauer’s horror. He told me that he had to steel himself to avoid being physically ill in the Soviet leader’s presence.

  Khrushchev was indeed his usual bullying, insulting self with Adenauer, shouting at one point that “capitalists roast Communists and eat them—what’s more, without salt!” Adenauer faced him down with his usual steely patience, but so little progress was made during one session that he ordered his airplane back from Frankfurt—though an aide made sure the order was given over an open and presumably monitored telephone line. Believing the Germans were about to pull out, the Soviets softened up considerably.

  Khrushchev was then relatively new to power and unfamiliar with the leaders he would be confronting in the free world. He was clearly intent upon testing Adenauer’s mettle. During one banquet he proposed a seemingly endless series of toasts to see whether the seventy-nine-year-old Adenauer, so intractable at the negotiating table, could be worn down by liquor. Though he preferred wine to vodka, Adenauer had a stomach as well as a will of iron. After fifteen toasts he was still both upright and alert—alert enough, in fact, to notice that Khrushchev had been drinking water. The next morning Adenauer confronted Khrushchev with the tongue-in-cheek suggestion that any man who would do such a thing could not be trusted. Surprised to find that he had been caught in the act, Khrushchev could only laugh.

  Throughout their week of confrontation
s, Adenauer matched Khrushchev blow for blow. When the Premier said in response to one German proposal, “I will see you in hell before I agree with you on that!” Adenauer shot back, “If you see me in hell, it will only be because you were there before I got there!” Another time, when Khrushchev shook his fist in anger, the Chancellor popped to his feet and shook both fists.

  The Russians were at their self-righteous best as they recited atrocities the Nazis had committed against the Soviet Union during World War II. Adenauer refused to don the mantle of abject guilt that the Kremlin had fashioned for him. He told Bulganin and Khrushchev that many Germans had opposed the war and added that his country also had suffered at the hands of Russian troops.

  This point triggered a typical outburst from Khrushchev, who asserted that Adenauer’s charge of Russian atrocities was “offensive.” “After all, who is responsible?” said Khrushchev haughtily. “We did not cross any frontiers. We did not start the war.”

  Adenauer stood firm. He reminded Khrushchev that he had been jailed by the Nazis both before and during the war and that as a result he had had plenty of time to consider the motives of those nations that were supporting Hitler. Khrushchev, his moralistic bubble burst by this pointed reference to the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1939, backed down, and the conversation proceeded for a while more genially.

  Over dinner that night in 1959 Adenauer recounted his verbal battles with Khrushchev with great relish. But he cautioned me that despite the Russian’s bumptious behavior it would be a deadly mistake to underestimate him. “He is highly intelligent, tough, and ruthless,” Adenauer said.

  Still, Adenauer had evidently enjoyed jousting with Khrushchev. I could see that, unlike some leaders, he did not shrink from unpleasant combat. On the contrary, he welcomed it. It was the same spirit he displayed when he later described his enjoyment of political campaigning. Throughout his life he always wanted to be in the arena rather than in the stands.