Mission to America

From Otto von Bismarck who founded the line, through Adolf Hitler to the 22nd and present incumbent, not a single German Chancellor has visited the U.S.--or been asked to. One dappled spring day last week, West Germany's Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, clutching a bon voyage bouquet of damp, limp jonquils and violets, flew off to Le Havre. There he boarded the liner United States for New York. His trip, he predicted, would benefit "our Vaterland, Europe and the free world." With him went his fresh-faced, 27-year-old schoolteacher daughter, Lotte. Also aboard: a modest retinue of press, protocol and foreign-relations advisers, and 50 bottles of 1949 Bernkasteler Doktor (a dry Moselle wine) for President Eisenhower.

Officially, Adenauer's mission to Washington is to express the gratitude of vanquished Germany for the unprecedented moral and financial aid (more than $4 billion) extended by a victor, the U.S. Germany's growing pride is also involved: Bonn newspapers noted happily that he would sleep in Blair House and be welcomed by Eisenhower. Among topics Ike and Adenauer would discuss: the Saar, the resettlement of 10 million East German refugees, offshore procurement, the Russian peace offensive.

Economy of Motion. Three and a half years ago, as Adenauer took office, he said: "I want to be ... both a good German and a good European," and added, "We need the help of the best Europeans of all ... the Americans." In Adenauer's baggage as he arrived this week were proofs of his success: the Bundestag endorsement of the European Defense Community, ratification of the Allied contractual agreement to end the occupation, a signed-and-sealed reparations treaty with Israel. Though Germany itself still stirs resentments among her unforgetting neighbors, Chancellor Adenauer has proved himself a good European.

The first German Chancellor to visit the U.S. carries his 77 years lightly. His face looks as stony and unflinching as an image carved into the Black Hills of South Dakota. He works tirelessly and with an old man's wise economy of motion. Besides running his government and his party, the Christian Democratic Union, his interests are few: gardening around his bluff-top house overlooking the Rhine, his religious devotions (Catholic), studying Dutch masters (he is an authority on the subject).

Tourist's Wishes. Adenauer personally laid out his busy, 12-day trip: three brisk days in Washington, a flight (on Ike's Constellation, Columbine) to San Francisco and the Monterey Peninsula for his first view of the Pacific, a trip to Chicago and Boston, winding up with a visit to Ottawa. Advisers tried to dissuade him from making the grand tour--it would be too exhausting, and besides, he would look like a mere tourist. Said Konrad Adenauer: "I want to see it all."

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