• • •
At the time of that 1959 visit to Washington, Adenauer had recently announced his decision to seek the West German presidency. He hoped to turn the office, until then a largely ceremonial one, into something similar to the French presidency under Charles de Gaulle. He would be able to make policy without the draining day-to-day political squabbles of the chancellorship.
The decision was not a wise one, but it was understandable. Adenauer had built the Federal Republic of Germany, and by his tenth year as Chancellor he had come to identify himself with it and wonder what would happen to it when he was gone. After the Nazi era Adenauer had never again fully trusted his countrymen. He once called them “carnivorous sheep.” Near the end of his life he told a reporter, “The German people seriously worry me. The only thing I can say for them is that they have lived through too much. They have not found peace of mind and stability since the war of 1914–1918.”
Because Adenauer never believed the German people were fully grown politically, he struggled to retain power longer than he should have and in fact to expand his power when he should have been quietly preparing the way for others to take over after him. During the presidential crisis of 1959 Adenauer reached too far.
Once again stories about his authoritarianism were trotted out, this time in connection with his handling of his cabinet. Many of them were close to the mark. According to one perhaps apocryphal story, after a cabinet debate on his landmark agreement giving “co-management” rights to factory workers, he was asked, “When are you going to grant co-management to your ministers?”
As what became known as the “presidential crisis” developed, Adenauer grew bitter because the leaders of the CDU, who had originally suggested that he seek the presidency, insisted on backing Ludwig Erhard to succeed him as Chancellor. Adenauer considered Erhard politically naive. He finally withdrew his candidacy for the presidency, deciding instead to keep the chancellorship himself in order to keep Erhard out of it. The former Finance Minister persisted, however, and he eventually became Chancellor upon Adenauer’s retirement in 1963.
In his eighties, though still an energetic, healthy man who accomplished as much in a day as a man twenty years younger, Adenauer occasionally became defensive about his advancing years. Once, though the subject of his eyesight had not come up, the Chancellor took off his glasses and held them out to show a visitor that they were not reading glasses but were designed only to deflect ultraviolet rays from his small, sensitive eyes. He took a nap daily but was loath to admit it; if someone asked how he had slept, he would snap, “I didn’t sleep, I was busy.”
This was not mere vanity. Adenauer believed that he was indispensable to the survival of West Germany. When the matter of his inevitable departure from office was timorously raised one day by some friends, he replied perfunctorily that, yes, it was possible he could be killed in an auto accident. During an interview on Adenauer’s ninetieth birthday in 1966, after he had left office, a reporter reminded the former Chancellor that he had also interviewed him on his eightieth birthday and said that he looked forward to doing so on his one hundredth. Responded der Alte, “Certainly. I will tell my secretary to make a note of it.”
Churchill and de Gaulle also found it difficult to think of anyone else in their places, let alone to prepare successors. In this respect they all differed from Yoshida and Eisenhower. The day Eisenhower selected me as his running mate in 1952, he told me of his shock when he found Truman was not adequately prepared to take over as President because Roosevelt had kept him in the dark on major issues. Eisenhower was determined not to make that mistake and assured me he would keep me completely informed so that I would be adequately prepared to take over if I should succeed him.
Few great men groom successors, but fewer still are as hard on their successors as Adenauer was. He sniped at Erhard in interviews and even to representatives of other nations who came to visit him in retirement. In one meeting I had with Erhard in my vice presidential office in the summer of 1959, he choked up and, with tears in his eyes, told me how deeply hurt he was by Adenauer’s treatment of him.
It was soon after he returned to West Germany from Dulles’s funeral that Adenauer announced he would remain as Chancellor. Though he had mentioned the subject only in passing during our meetings, the decision must have been weighing heavily on his mind. Despite this he found time for a personal gesture that reveals the warm human qualities he rarely displayed in public.
Since childhood Adenauer had been an avid horticulturist. As a youngster he was given to experimentation until an attempt to produce “creeping pansies” led his father to admonish him, “One must never try to interfere with the work of God.” Later, working in his rose garden gave Adenauer comfort from the anguish of the Nazi years and relief from the constant pressures of the chancellorship. Professional flower growers were admirers of his work, including Mathias Tantau of Uetersen, who bred a new rose and named it after a delighted Adenauer in 1953. A full, dark-red flower, the “Konrad Adenauer” can still be seen in gardens all over the world, a living testament to a great professional politician and an equally great amateur gardener.
The rules of protocol often made Mrs. Nixon his dinner partner at the White House and on other diplomatic occasions. They got along famously. He once asked me what her background was. When I told him that she was half German and half Irish, he snapped his fingers, smiled broadly, and said, “I could have guessed it. The Irish-German combination produces the most intelligent and beautiful women in the world.”
In their conversations he learned that she shared his interest in flowers. When he came to our home the day after the funeral, he asked to see our modest backyard garden. A few weeks later one hundred rose bushes arrived by air from West Germany.
The following March, Adenauer made his seventh visit to the U.S. He sent word ahead that he wanted to meet with me, and we made an appointment for six o’clock one evening at our home. Fifteen minutes ahead of time Mrs. Nixon suddenly saw the Chancellor’s limousine pulling up in front of the house. When she opened the door, he announced that he had come early to see how his rose bushes had survived the winter. When I arrived for our six o’clock meeting, I was astonished to find him standing in our garden, discussing the state of the roses with her as intently as he would later be discussing the state of the world with me.
Adenauer’s visit to our home attracted a great deal of attention, especially because he was trailed by photographers and West German newsreel cameramen. One columnist, Ruth Montgomery, wrote, “The friendship between the eighty-four-year-old German Chancellor and the forty-seven-year-old American fascinates official Washington. The two politicians have met and huddled on at least a half-dozen previous occasions, but the most recent one was certainly the chummiest.” She added, “Should Nixon capture the White House, Adenauer seems to have laid the groundwork for another intimate liaison like the one he used to enjoy with the late Secretary of State John Foster Dulles.”
For years Adenauer had been a master at using the press as a tactical political weapon. That June he was reported as believing that Senator Kennedy did not have enough training or experience in foreign affairs to be President. Meanwhile Franz-Josef Strauss, Adenauer’s Defense Minister, had ordered his ministry to assess what a Kennedy administration might mean in the international arena. A copy of the ministry’s report—it became known as the “Strauss indiscretion”—was leaked to the Baltimore Sun, which headlined the story “Nixon More Acceptable to Germans.” According to an Adenauer biographer, “It was perfectly true, as far as Adenauer and the CDU were concerned. . . .”
Adenauer’s practical interest in cultivating my friendship was clear from the political advice he gave me as the 1960 campaign approached and also from his uncomplimentary remarks about Senator Kennedy. By the mid-1950s he knew that I might become President, and he wanted to begin building a working relationship with a dependably conservative possible successor to Eisenhower.
But a
fter Kennedy won and I lost in November, he made clear that his motives were also more personal. Adenauer had been inviting Mrs. Nixon and me to West Germany since the mid-1950s, but the usual range of pressures and duties had always made it impossible for us to accept. Shortly after my defeat in the election, I received a very warm letter from Adenauer in which he wrote sympathetically of what he knew must be my feelings and renewed his invitation to Mrs. Nixon and me to visit Bonn.
It was not until ten years after I first met Adenauer that I finally was able to accept his invitation. In the summer of 1963 Mrs. Nixon and I and our two daughters took a six-week vacation that included a stop in Germany. I visited Adenauer in the Chancellor’s office in Bonn, and we talked for over an hour with only his trusted interpreter present.
I gave him my impressions of Europe in general and described my dismay at my first glimpse of the Berlin Wall. We were to visit France next, and Adenauer particularly asked me to give his best wishes to his friend de Gaulle, for whom he had developed unbounded affection and respect since they first met in the 1950s. He expressed guarded support for the nuclear test-ban treaty, which was to be signed the next month. But he warned that the Soviet Union’s willingness to sign the treaty in no way reflected a change in its expansionist aims.
To my surprise, however, this uncompromising foe of communism expressed the view that the U.S. should not “put all its eggs in one basket” and should move toward rapprochement with Communist China as a buffer to Soviet expansionism.
As we talked, I was saddened to see that for the first time he had lost some of the buoyant zeal that had always been so evident before in our talks. After his party had been battered in the election that followed the Berlin Wall crisis, he had bowed to pressure from younger leaders and promised to step down after two more years. Now that time was approaching. He would soon be out of power, he had very little confidence in his successor, and he would be leaving the stage before he had fully realized his dream of a unified, steadfast free Europe.
• • •
In October 1963 Adenauer made his farewell speech to the Bundestag. When he was finished he gathered his papers, stepped from behind his chair on the cabinet bench, and walked, stiff-backed and solemn, to the desk assigned to him on the floor of the parliament. His bearing was dignified and his face characteristically impassive as he gave up the power of the chancellorship, but his heart was in turmoil. Though he had spent fourteen years laying the foundations of a prosperous, free, and secure West Germany, he was leaving office a deeply troubled man because he was afraid that what he had built might not last.
His successor, Ludwig Erhard, though a brilliant economist, had little foreign policy experience. At the same time developments that Adenauer thought ominous were unfolding on the international scene. Within the last month the United States and Canada had announced plans to sell $750 million worth of wheat and flour to the Soviet Union. Only two days before his farewell to the Bundestag, he had urged President Kennedy not to approve such sales without wringing something from the Soviets in return, such as concessions on the Berlin question. That summer he had told me of his fears of just such a development; when he mentioned the word détente, he shuddered visibly. “I am tired and frightened by this talk of détente,” he said.
He was concerned, as I was, about the tendency of some naive leaders and opinion makers in the West to view détente as an alternative to deterrence rather than insisting, as we both did, that there could be no détente without deterrence.
Our last meeting was during a fact-finding tour of Europe I made in 1967 prior to the 1968 presidential elections.
Having stepped down as Chancellor in 1963, Adenauer had also given up the presidency of the CDU in 1966. He had been given a small office in the Bundeshaus as a courtesy. When I entered it, I was shocked at his appearance. For the first time der Alte really was an old man, stripped of his power and no longer able to direct the destiny of his country. He was almost painfully thin, and his ramrod-straight posture had deteriorated into a noticeable stoop. But this ninety-one-year-old man had lost none of his mental alertness. He walked across the room as I entered and embraced me. Then he stepped back and, with his hands still on my shoulders, said, “Thank God you are here. Your visit is like manna from heaven.”
On the wall I saw a painting of the Acropolis of Athens, which Adenauer said was a gift from the man who had painted it—Winston Churchill. I also noticed the photograph of Dulles that he had shown Sulzberger eight years before. After exchanging pleasantries, we embarked on an intense discussion of international politics.
He expressed great concern about the future of France after de Gaulle, saying, “De Gaulle is not anti-American; he is pro-European.” He pointed out that a recent poll had indicated that forty percent of the French people favored better relations with the Soviet Union. Only de Gaulle, he believed, could hold the line against the left; once he was gone, the left would inevitably prevail in France.
John McCloy told me that Adenauer’s admiration for de Gaulle approached hero worship. After a visit he made to the French leader’s home at Colombey, he said to McCloy with awe in his voice, “Do you know who came to the door when I knocked? Not an aide or a servant, but de Gaulle himself.” In his mind I imagine he envisioned Charles de Gaulle as the lineal descendant of his own ninth-century hero, Charlemagne—or Charles the Great, as he is sometimes called.
Like Adenauer and Dulles, Adenauer and de Gaulle were alike in some ways. Both were big, impressive men in every way. Both were profoundly religious. Both were devoted family men. Both had great inner strength and outward dignity. Both were men of vision.
But in other ways they were quite different. While de Gaulle was a fine writer, Adenauer was not. De Gaulle, though known primarily as a military leader, was basically an introspective intellectual and a creative thinker. He was essentially a man of thought; Adenauer was essentially a man of action. Adenauer would often lighten up serious discussions with humor and pleasant banter; I cannot recall a time when de Gaulle did so.
What matters most is that these two postwar giants respected each other and worked together to heal centuries-old conflict between France and Germany. Neither would have been able to do it alone. That they exercised power at the same time in their respective countries was one of the fortunate accidents of history.
Adenauer told me that he disagreed with his friend de Gaulle’s view that the U.S. should withdraw from Vietnam. He asked rhetorically whether the Germans, for example, would feel confident of our continued support if we let the South Vietnamese down. But he added that if we stayed in Vietnam, we would be doing precisely what the Soviets wanted. “The Russians are not going to try to help you get out of Vietnam,” he said. “They want you to stay there. They want to drain you white and consequently they aren’t going to help you unless some other factor changes the situation so that it is in their interest to do so.”
He scoffed at the suggestion being made by some political and business leaders in Germany and the United States that increased trade between the West and the Soviet Union would bring peace. His cryptic comment was that “business is business.” I had to agree. Trade alone does not assure peace. In both world wars, trading partners had suddenly found themselves bitter enemies.
His main concern now, as it had been when I had first met him fourteen years before, was the Soviets’ aggressive policies. He was concerned that they were building four more access routes to Berlin. He pointed out that their first target would be Germany and then France. On the other hand, he said they recognized that their greatest enemy was the United States. “Make no mistake about it,” he said, “they want the world. The whole world. Most of all they want Europe, and to get Europe they know they must destroy Germany. We need you to keep us strong and free. But you also need us.”
He was skeptical about the nuclear nonproliferation treaty, which was then being negotiated. He pointed out that the Morgenthau Plan would have resulted in the permanent destruction
of German industry. The Marshall Plan had built it up. Now the nonproliferation treaty would in effect limit Germany’s potential to become a world power. The Soviets certainly recognized this; in a rare moment of candor Aleksei Kosygin had admitted to the Danish Prime Minister, “Only if the Germans sign is the treaty important to us.”
Adenauer criticized German Foreign Minister Willy Brandt’s policy of Ostpolitik: trying to ease tension by making a series of “small steps” toward better relations with the Soviet bloc. Like his old friend Foster Dulles, he warned to his dying day against being taken in by Russian “peace” overtures. In his view a Communist peace offensive was just that: a tactic calculated to split the West and win total victory without war.
He spoke at some length about Soviet-Chinese relations. He recalled that Khrushchev had expressed almost pathological concern about the threat of the Chinese in the long run. Khrushchev had told Adenauer, “Twelve million Chinese are born each year and each one exists on a bowl of rice.” He had cupped his hands as he made this point. Khrushchev, he believed, had a mortal fear that once the Chinese acquired atomic weapons, they would be a threat not only to the Soviet Union but to all nations of the world.
From a geopolitical perspective Adenauer could see few fundamental differences between the Chinese and the Russians. “They both want to rule the world,” he said. But he made the point again, as he had in 1963, that the U.S. should tilt toward the Chinese as long as the Soviets presented the greater military threat.
A little over a month after our conversation, Adenauer died at his home in Rhöndorf. His son Paul later told Terence Prittie that Adenauer “worried a lot at the end, but never about himself. He was worrying about Europe’s disunity and impotence, about the dangers of nuclear war, about people becoming the victims of their illusions. He wanted to go on fighting.” I learned later, from his daughter Libet, that I had been the last American to see him, just as I had been the first American to welcome him to the United States in 1953.
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