Platform Abroad

West Berlin's fighting Socialist Mayor Willy Brandt clearly found the U.S. a fine place to campaign for the chancellorship of West Germany. In a whirlwind week, he talked to a Meet the Press panel, conferred with President Kennedy, addressed the Herzl Institute, named after the founder of Zionism. Wearing a green tie, he stood for hours as a guest of honor, reviewing Manhattan's St. Patrick's Day parade. His message everywhere was of a Germany repentant of its past, proud of its progress, and pledged to "unbreakable friendship with the United States and the Western community."

Brandt took credit (while bowing to the Marshall Plan) for converting Berlin from "a heap of rubble into a new center of economic and cultural activity." He said Kennedy "has not the slightest intention of giving up the obligations assumed in Berlin." of trading freedom for "the false flag of a 'free city.' " Brandt dealt candidly with German fears over the impact of the forthcoming trial of Adolf Eichmann in Israel, with its reminders of the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis. The "terrible crimes" of the Nazi era "cannot be blotted out, not by good will, nor by restitution and in demnification. Children and grandchildren will have to come to terms with that her itage as well as possible ... I am fully aware that after all that has happened my people cannot claim as a matter of course what is granted to other nations." But, hitting a point politically impor tant back home, Brandt urged the U.S.

"not to think of the partitioning of Germany as just punishment for moral and political guilt," when in fact a divided Germany is "a malignancy in the heart of Europe." The 17 million East Germans cannot "be thrown on the rubbish heap of pensable" history." and Brandt looked called forward NATO to "indis some sort of "political Atlantic community." And he urged that the West "abandon the fear that Communists are supermen and instead recognize that they are a calculable and thus defeatable entity." Willy Brandt. 47, easily convinced the U.S. that he was a stout and able friend.

Now all he had to do was convince West Germans that he would make a better chancellor than Konrad Adenauer, 85 --who will come to the U.S. next month for a little campaigning of his own.

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