The Reckoning

The Bundestag went about its task with as much zest as a man stepping up to the dentist's chair. Voting on 85-year-old Konrad Adenauer's re-election to a fourth term as West Germany's Chancellor, no fewer than 26 of 241 Christian Democrats present showed their distaste for their party leader by dropping blank white cards into the plastic ballot box. When all the ballots were counted, der Alte had squeaked through with only eight more votes than the required majority of 250. Many delegates ostentatiously sat on their hands, and Economics Minister Ludwig Erhard, who had been cruelly punished by Adenauer for his own feeble bid for the chancellorship, stalked out puffing on a dead cigar.

When the Chancellor visits Washington next week for consultations on the Berlin crisis, President Kennedy will be the first Western leader to assess the foreign policy concessions that Adenauer has made in his coalition deal with the Free Democrats--or at least to discover which of the conditions Adenauer considers binding. The text of the coalition agreement is still secret, but it is known to include a demand that West Germany, as a NATO partner, should have nuclear weapons as well as "modern launching systems," and an equal voice with the U.S. in any decision to use atomic warheads. In the past, as Kennedy recalled last week at his press conference, Adenauer has forsworn nuclear weapons for his army.

The agreement also includes a proviso that the government should take the initiative "for itself and the West" on all questions directly affecting Germany--even to the point of accepting Germany-wide disarmament and neutrality as a possible basis for reunification. Konrad Adenauer will ignore such far-out conditions when he sits down with President Kennedy next week. As in the past, he will reject recognition of East Germany and of East Germany's Oder-Neisse frontier with Poland. On the issue of a neutralized Germany, the doughty old Chancellor has made it clear that he will never budge, for it would make West Germany a "Soviet satellite."

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