The Light Touch of the Genial Rhinelander

I'm not a special friend of pretension," Walter Scheel once said. Indeed he is not. He arrived in Moscow three weeks ago wearing a rumpled sports coat, striped shirt and red tie. He puffed on his Montecristo No. 1 cigars steadily throughout the twelve days of negotiations. One night he went on a tour of Moscow nightspots, ending up at the Slavyansky Bazar, a haunt of young Russians, where he danced exuberantly with bemused Russian girls. Certainly he represents a new school of diplomacy, whose members believe in direct and candid contact. To traditionalists he may appear frivolous, if not downright reckless. By classic standards, Scheel would certainly seem too imprecise and incautious to negotiate treaties on which depend the fate of nations. The London Financial Times summarily dismissed him last fall as "an attractive and amusing man who cannot help looking lightweight."

The charge is not easy to deny, for Scheel does indeed seem to relish playing the clown. A few days before he was to leave for Moscow, Scheel named his newborn daughter Andrea after none other than Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko. Then, in a balancing act, he gave the baby the middle name Gwendolyn because she was born on July 21, the day negotiations began for Britain's Common Market entry. Scheel's friends insist that his manner is deceptive. Says one: "He has a Rhinelander's way of being outwardly charming, obliging and serene. But behind it is tenacity and perseverance."

Once when he was chided for not being hard enough, Scheel replied: "What is hardness? Isn't it perhaps more important that a person achieve in the end what he sets out to do? And most of the time I've succeeded."

Scheel was born in the cutlery town of Solingen in the Ruhr 51 years ago. The son of a wheel maker, he grew up to become a Luftwaffe pilot, a steel-factory superintendent and a politician. As leader of the left wing of the small Free Democratic Party, he served five years as Development Aid Minister through two governments; his staying power was such that he dubbed himself "the Mikoyan of the F.D.P." It was he who led the F.D.P. to flip-flop from right to left, and was instrumental in forming the coalition that brought Willy Brandt to the chancellorship last October. His only concession to the formality of his new post was to forsake his sporty blue BMW for the properly ministerial black Mercedes limousine.

At Moscow, Scheel showed that he could both negotiate and make people laugh. When asked how he felt after the early discussions hit snags, he replied: "I've kept my casualness but for the time being I've canceled my cheerfulness." Later he won several important concessions, such as the unilateral declaration of German unity and a private understanding from Gromyko that the renuniciation-of-force treaty would pave the way toward progress in the Big Four talks on Berlin. In an unusually cordial gesture, Gromyko invited Scheel for the weekend to his dacha outside Moscow. Shucking their coats and settling down in wicker chairs, the two men reviewed their negotiations while sipping tea, cognac and kvass, and ended the evening swapping hunting stories.

Scheel returned Gromyko's hospitality by throwing a lavish luncheon for both delegations. In the middle of the luncheon, Scheel, who had just received a picture of his baby daughter yawning, whipped out his wallet to show Gromyko his little German namesake.

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