The Old Man's Anger

In his Black Forest mountain retreat last week. West Germany's Chancellor Konrad Adenauer stared without pleasure at his beloved Rhine, stalked through the forest side by side with his priest son Paul in somber silence. For the first time since he began to vacation at Buehlerhoehe six years ago, its charms failed to soothe the 80-year-old Chancellor's troubled spirits. "He talks of many things," said an intimate. "First he talks of the Radford plan. Then he talks of the weather. Then he talks of the Radford plan. Then he talks about food. Then he talks about the Radford plan."

Konrad Adenauer is a man who feels betrayed. He visited the U.S. last June with what he regarded as a prized gift for his old friend John Foster Dulles: a promise that, despite all the public opposition and the criticism from the Socialists, the Bundestag would soon pass a conscription law. Since West German rearmament has long been a prime goal of U.S. foreign policy. Adenauer made his pledge with happy anticipation, but got in return, say his aides, only a polite smile. Driving away from Dulles' office, Adenauer uneasily told a subordinate: "I have a feeling something may be wrong."

Nuclear Thunderbolt. Not until mid-July, after he had pushed his conscription bill through a reluctant Bundestag, did Adenauer discover how justified his uneasiness was. Then, like a thunderbolt, came press reports that Admiral Arthur Radford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had proposed that the U.S. chop its armed forces from 2,800,000 men to 2,000.000 by 1960, in keeping with the development of nuclear weapons. To Germans the so-called Radford plan--and Sir Anthony Eden's prompt hints that Britain, too, planned to "go nuclear"--clearly foreshadowed a reduction in the number of Anglo-American troops stationed in West Germany, possibly even--in the excitable conclusion-jumping of the German press (and the New York Times)--a neo-isolationist U.S. retreat to "Fortress America." Adenauer had argued that conscription was necessary to raise the twelve divisions West Germany had promised NATO. Then Dulles himself conceded in a press conference that, as part of a general shift away from conventional military forces. NATO might no longer need so many German divisions.

"I Am Lost." "This seems to prove that the Socialists may have been right all the time," said Adenauer. "I am lost." He dispatched German Lieut. General Adolf Heusinger, who is in effect the West German Chief of Staff, to the Pentagon to find out exactly what the Radford plan implied. Heusinger returned bearing the news (which Adenauer's Foreign Office should have given him long ago) of a shift of emphasis from conventional military forces to nuclear "firepower" as a primary goal of the Eisenhower Administration. Heusinger also brought U.S. "reassurances" that the Radford plan was not yet policy, and last week both Dulles and Britain's Selwyn Lloyd promised West German Foreign Minister Heinrich von Brentano that "for the time being" they do not intend to reduce their combat potential in West Germany.

Adenauer was not reassured. Last week, in an article in the official government Bulletin, Adenauer launched an open attack on the Radford plan. "As to the debate on conventional and nuclear weapons started by the Americans," he wrote, "I would like to stress distinctly that for the time being I consider it unsuitable to shift the center of gravity to atomic weapons." His reasoning: what happened in Korea might happen in Germany, and to counter an East German invasion of West Germany with nuclear weapons would almost certainly "trigger an intercontinental rocket war. I am of the opinion that it is of special importance to localize small conflicts, and for this we need divisions with conventional weapons."

Overrun by History. Adenauer, said a Foreign Office aide, is "hurt and bitter" at U.S. treatment. In his new bitterness at Dulles, the Chancellor talks pointedly of the honestly and sincerity of Harry Truman (whom he met for the first time two months ago). And over and over again he laments, "The least they could have done was tell me."

Whether or not Adenauer is entitled to his anger, the fact is that he considers that he had laid his reputation and his political life on the line for Dulles and the U.S. Adenauer's U.S.-inspired foreign policy has failed to bring German reunification any closer. With only a year to go until West Germany's next general election, German voters had been presented with what seemed to them clear evidence that Konrad Adenauer's credit in Washington was decreasing. ("Adenauer," predicted the pro-Socialist Frankfurter Rundschau, "will be overrun by history, just like Syngman Rhee.") Simultaneously, the Socialist argument that it was senseless for West Germany to introduce conscription at a time when other nations were reducing conventional forces took on new plausibility. Last week both of West Germany's leading polls showed substantial Socialist gains amongst the voters, making them for the first time about equally as strong as Adenauer's Christian Democrats.

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