On the Job

Chancellor Kurt Kiesinger one morning last week tapped a brass bell with a wooden gavel, thus convened the first Cabinet meeting of West Germany's new black-and-red coalition government. For the next six hours, the ten Ministers from Kiesinger's Christian Democratic Union and the nine from the Social Democratic Party got their initial taste of working with longtime political foes. The main task: formulating a policy statement of government objectives, which Kiesinger will present this week to the Bundestag. Some of the points: warmer relations with Paris, fiscal reform, budget cuts.

The Cabinet members were also getting accustomed to their new ministerial offices. Socialist Leader Willy Brandt held his first meeting with aides in the Foreign Ministry, announced that he will fly to Paris this week to talk with Charles de Gaulle and arrange a meeting between the French President and Kiesinger in early January. The Christian Democrats' Gerhard Schroder, who served as Foreign Minister under Erhard, arrived at the Defense Ministry just after the Luftwaffe's new commander, Lieut. General Johann Steinhoff, grounded the service's 769 Starfighters following the 65th crash of the U.S.-designed fighter-bomber. He and Steinhoff agreed that the planes should not fly again until they are outfitted with improved ejection seats.

Franz Josef Strauss, 51, the barrel-shaped boss of the Christian Democrats' autonomous Bavarian branch, took on perhaps the most difficult portfolio of all: finance. Former Chancellor Ludwig Erhard's government in effect fell over the refusal of his Free Democrat coalition partners to go along with needed tax increases. But Strauss has less balky coalition mates. As a start toward wiping out the $1.5 billion deficit for the 1967 budget, Strauss did exactly what Erhard had wanted to do: increased taxes on gasoline and tobacco. The new political alignment made all the difference: Strauss's bill to collect an additional $375 million in revenues zipped through the Bundestag with a healthy majority. Marveled Hamburg's Die Welt: "Financial problems that the Erhard government kept putting off until it broke up over them are now settled almost overnight in lightning procedures."

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