Spirit of the Front Line

For a few days it looked as if Berlin had lost its staunchest defender against Communism, indomitable Mayor Ernst Reuter.

During elections in West Berlin last month, Reuter's Social Democratic Party failed to regain its long-standing majority, captured only 61 out of 127 seats in the city's House of Representatives. The other seats went to a coalition of Christian Democrats and Free Democrats, who put up their own candidate for mayor, a hardworking but uninspiring politician named Walter Schreiber. The House of Representatives, which by Berlin law elects the mayor, took a vote. Result: a tie between the two candidates. According to the city constitution, the tie should have been resolved by lot, but the representatives felt that Berlin's fate was too important to be decided by chance; they instructed the two candidates to work out a solution.

Even West Germany's Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, a Christian Democrat and no friend of Socialists, supported Socialist Reuter. Schreiber patriotically got the point, agreed to serve as Reuter's deputy, with a strong hand on the city's patronage lever. Last week the House of Representatives formally elected Reuter for another four-year term. All three of Berlin's non-Communist parties were once more solidly united against the Reds.

Before electing Reuter, the Berlin House of Representatives last week had another duty; it formally said goodbye to Major General Maxwell D. Taylor, U.S. commander in Berlin, who had been, like its mayor, a firm champion of Berlin's freedom. Said Taylor, who will return to the U.S. to become an assistant U.S. Army chief of staff: "Here is the spirit of the front line, which brings a solidarity found nowhere else in Germany, perhaps nowhere else in Europe . . ." Then Taylor introduced his successor, Major General Lemuel Mathewson, 51, a West Pointer with 28 years' service in the Army, and a crack artilleryman. Said General Taylor: "He will be another American who came to occupy Berlin, stayed to defend it, and left as a Berliner."

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