Paying Homage to History

By William R. Doerner.

The scene Sunday was filled with poignancy, the mood as dark as the grim German day. The President of the United States, holding the hand of his wife Nancy, paced somberly through the museum of Bergen-Belsen, one of the concentration camps where Holocaust victims were exterminated as part of Hitler's Final Solution. As the Reagans passed picture after picture of wretched inmates and naked corpses, they had trouble holding back their emotions. Proceeding to an 80-ft. gray stone obelisk that towers above the camp's mounded mass graves, Reagan spoke huskily of Bergen-Belsen's dead, who include Dutch Schoolgirl Anne Frank. Then he sounded his uplifting theme: "We are here today to confirm that the horror cannot outlast hope."

Reagan's pilgrimage, which also featured a stop at the grave of Konrad Adenauer and a bitterly controversial ceremony of reconciliation at a military cemetery in Bitburg, climaxed a drama that could hardly have been more unexpected or perverse. What began as a ceremonial addendum to his duties at the economic summit in Bonn had escalated into the most passionate dispute of his presidency. A gesture of friendship had instead revived memories of the Holocaust and World War II, strained relations between the U.S. and West Germany, and provoked worldwide debate. As the tumult raged on all last week, Reagan and his West German host, Chancellor Helmut Kohl, moved gamely through their appointed rounds, more the prisoners than the proprietors of their enterprise.

Reagan's speech at Bergen-Belsen was carefully crafted to acknowledge Nazi atrocities while also striking a note of amity with the Germans. The message, delivered with obvious feeling, was a skillful exercise in both the art of eulogy and political damage control. "Above all, we are struck by the horror of it all--the monstrous, incomprehensible horror," Reagan said. "Here, death ruled."

The sight of the lush German countryside on his flight to Bergen-Belsen, Reagan said, reminded him that prisoners at the camp must have despaired of ever seeing spring again. Choking with emotion, he went on: "All these children of God, under bleak and lifeless mounds, the plainness of which does not even hint at the unspeakable acts that created them. Here they lie, never to hope, never to pray, never to live, never to heal, never to laugh, never to cry."

"We are all witnesses," he said. "Hope leads us, if we are prepared to trust it, toward what our President Lincoln called 'the better angels of our nature.' And then, rising above all this cruelty, out of this tragic and nightmarish time, beyond the anguish, the pain and suffering, and for all time, we can and must pledge: Never again."

Reagan and Kohl next flew to the western town of Bitburg for the reconciliation ceremony. It was this act, symbolizing the restoration of friendship, that stood at the heart of the controversy roiling around them. Buried in the soil of Bitburg were the remains not only of ordinary German fighting men but also of 49 members of the Waffen SS, a branch of the elite Nazi guard that ran the death camps, though the Waffen SS did not serve in that capacity.

After all the anger stirred by the cemetery plans, both Reagan and Kohl were determined to keep the wreath laying there as low-key as possible. They succeeded. Air Force One carried the two leaders into a U.S. air base on the outskirts of Bitburg, a pleasant town in the Eifel hills where 11,000 Americans live in friendship with a roughly equal number of Germans. A motorcade took them through open country, then into a residential area and to the small cemetery. There the flat markers, arranged in 32 rows, had been polished for the visit, and flowers were placed at each stone.

Reagan and Kohl spent just eight minutes at the cemetery. Accompanied by two World War II officers--General Matthew Ridgway, 90, who led the U.S. 82nd Airborne Division, and General Johannes Steinhoff, 71, a former Luftwaffe ace--they walked a path encircling the headstones, then stopped at a gray wall, where four German soldiers attended two tall wreaths. The two Americans and the two Germans simultaneously approached their separate wreaths. Then they stepped back as a German military bugler sounded a German tribute to lost soldiers, I Once Had a Comrade. Kohl and Reagan met some relatives of German soldiers who opposed Hitler and then passed German and U.S. military honor guards.

The three-mile route between the cemetery and the air base was lined with police barricades. An officer was stationed every 12 ft. along the way; 2,000 policemen from neighboring towns had been summoned for the duty. Jewish protesters were permitted to stand at one road near the cemetery. One of them, Dov Hikind, an American whose mother had survived Auschwitz, said angrily, "I still can't believe I am here to see my President rehabilitate the SS." Sixty members of the World Jewish Student Union held a vigil in the town square. Reagan came close to a protest scene only as his motorcade passed through the downtown area en route to the air base. There was a brief scuffle as police carrying plastic shields broke up a fight that had started among the protesters. Overall, the demonstrations were smaller than expected and major clashes were avoided.

A more serious anti-American display occurred Sunday in Madrid, where Reagan was scheduled to begin a two-day state visit on Monday as the guest of King Juan Carlos and Queen Sophia. Some 500,000 protesters marched through the downtown area, burning American flags and calling Reagan a "murderer" and a "fascist."

After the solemnity of the cemetery scene, the mood shifted at the air base, where a German military band played The Star-Spangled Banner and U.S. Air Force musicians followed with the West German national anthem. Reagan and Kohl stood at attention on a raised blue platform before 7,500 spectators, many waving small U.S. and West German flags. Said Kohl: "This walk with the President over the graves of the soldiers was not an easy walk . . . I thank you personally as a friend that you undertook this walk with me."

Reagan was eloquent in turn. He acknowledged the depth of the controversy surrounding his appearance. "This visit has stirred many emotions in the American and German people too," he said. "Some old wounds have been reopened, and this I regret very much, because this should be a time of healing."

Reagan gave special assurances to the men who fought in World War II. "To the veterans and families of American servicemen who still feel the painful losses of that war, our gesture of reconciliation today in no way minimizes our love and honor for those who fought and died for our country." To the "survivors of the Holocaust," he said: "Many of you are worried that reconciliation means forgetting. But I promise you, we will never forget."

Reagan specifically mentioned the SS members buried at Bitburg. "The crimes of the SS must rank among the most heinous in human history," he said. "But others buried there were simply soldiers in the German army." The President went on: "The evil world of Nazism turned all values upside down. Nevertheless, we can mourn the German war dead as human beings, crushed by a vicious ideology."

Then, as his peroration, Reagan sought to make universal the contest between democracy and totalitarianism of any sort. "The struggle for freedom is not complete, for much of the world is still cast in totalitarian darkness." Invoking John F. Kennedy's famous "Ich bin ein Berliner" pronouncement of 1963, Reagan continued: "Today freedom-loving people around the world must say, 'I am a Berliner. I am a Jew in a world still threatened by anti- Semitism. I am an Afghan and I am a prisoner of the gulag. I am a refugee in a crowded boat foundering off the coast of Viet Nam. I am a Laotian, a Cambodian, a Cuban and a Miskito Indian in Nicaragua. I too am a potential victim of totalitarianism.' "

With that ringing flourish the President had completed a simplified but still stirring set of themes: horror at the past, vigilance in the present, hope for the future. Rhetorically, at least, he had approached a highly charged problem with directness and skill. As Reagan and Kohl reboarded Air Force One to return to Bonn, the President's relieved staff applauded both leaders. Said Reagan: "It was a very moving day for all of us, a day of remembrance and hope."

The sense of unease that was so evident throughout the day--that indeed had been building for two weeks--had been heightened by four bomb blasts in Dusseldorf and Cologne. On Saturday a march in Bonn sponsored by the leftist Green political party attracted 7,000 political radicals, peace activists and leather-jacketed punkers. They carried banners with anti-NATO and pro- Communist slogans. Police charged one group of marchers burning an American flag in Munsterplatz, a cobblestoned pedestrian mall in the city center, and used tear gas to break up some of the crowd. In the ensuing melee, eleven officers and some of the protesters were injured. Some 35 demonstrators were arrested.

For both political and personal reasons, Kohl was determined to resist changing plans for the Bitburg ceremony. As the first West German Chancellor to spend his entire adult life in the postwar era, he has made a crusade of restoring West Germany to full international legitimacy. To have backed away from Bitburg, in his view, would have been to falter in that quest. The Chancellor was also acutely aware that a change in plans seemingly dictated by Washington would have opened him to a charge of weak leadership. One public- opinion poll taken at the height of the controversy showed 72% of West German adults surveyed thought the visit should go forward.

Kohl made his case to Reagan in a telephone call on April 19. The itinerary had been personally reviewed and approved by Presidential Aide Michael Deaver, and Reagan was reluctant to propose any last-minute changes that Kohl would resist. Reagan had decided, instead, to add the Bergen-Belsen visit, which he had previously avoided, as a way of clearly demonstrating his abhorrence of Nazi atrocities.

Reagan used more defensible if still less than airtight logic in justifying the itinerary early last week. His plan, he said, was "morally right," because it celebrated a "miracle" of postwar reconciliation. Unlike prior conflicts, which were "settled in such a way that they planted the seeds of the next war," World War II led to "40 years of peace and 40 years of alliance." His intent, the President said, was to "use this occasion to make it plain that never again must we find ourselves enemies and never again must there be anything like the Holocaust." That still left unclear, however, why it was moral to do the commemorating at Bitburg.

The President received some support for his hang-tough decision, though primarily on practical rather than moral grounds. Among political figures, former President Richard Nixon and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger advised him to stick with his original itinerary. Canceling the Bitburg visit, said Kissinger, "would do enormous damage to our foreign policy." Nixon reportedly warned Administration officials that "the credibility of future negotiations is at stake."

But public opinion seemed strongly against the cemetery visit. Both houses of Congress passed resolutions imploring Reagan to reconsider the Bitburg stop. The Senate passed its resolution by voice vote; the House vote was 390 to 26. Said New York Congressman Mario Biaggi: "The issue is not whether the President spend one second, 15 minutes or one hour at Bitburg. He doesn't belong there at all." Editorial reaction was largely critical. Said the Des Moines Register: "President Reagan has trifled with tragedy." Agreed the Los Angeles Times: "Those who protest the Bitburg trip do not seek to give offense. Their wish is only that the President of the U.S. do nothing that could be interpreted as memorializing or dignifying the agents of Nazi criminality."

Jewish religious leaders were virtually unanimous in opposing any ceremony that might be interpreted as extending reconciliation to the SS, and other religious leaders joined in disapproval. New York's Cardinal-designate John J. O'Connor called for "a further change of plans that would nonetheless honor the dead." Argued Bishop Alexander Stewart, executive administrator for the Episcopal Church: "It would have been more appropriate to have visited the aged mothers of the young men who are buried there."

Theologians were troubled by the symbolism of the wreath-laying at Bitburg. "It is a very religious gesture," said Harvard Divinity School Professor Harvey Cox, "and he has no right performing as a kind of high priest of the United States." Rabbi Alexander Schindler, president of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, made a similar point. "It is not his job to offer absolution to anyone," said Schindler. "He is overstepping the proper bounds. He might as well place a wreath at Hitler's bunker."

Leaders of most nations attending the economic summit, including other victorious World War II Allies, carefully distanced themselves from the U.S.-German ceremony. British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, normally a loyal supporter of Reagan policies, responded to a Labor M.P.'s attack in Parliament on the Bitburg visit by noting that "I have considerable sympathy with what the honorable gentleman said." In Paris, the French Secretary of State for European Affairs, Catherine Lalumiere, said her government "shares the emotion" unleashed by the cemetery imbroglio. Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney called Reagan's determination to proceed "a most unfavorable situation."

But no amount of public pressure was going to make Reagan change his mind. As he told TIME's Hugh Sidey only hours before leaving for Bonn: "We're not going there in the sense of forgive and forget. What I believe is needed is a recognition of what has been accomplished in Germany . . ." One bit of news that lifted the President's spirits before his departure from Washington was a private poll paid for by the Republican National Committee showing that Americans did not blame the President personally for the Bitburg problem.

Reagan's advisers did what they could to distract attention from Bitburg. Shortly after the President's arrival in Bonn, they announced an embargo on trade between the U.S. and the Marxist Sandinista regime of Nicaragua. They also quietly suggested that Kohl was mainly responsible for the Bitburg debacle, even as they publicly insisted that there had been no damage to the close relationship between the two leaders and their countries.

Perhaps inevitably, the recriminations were severest at the staff level, precisely where much of the sloppy work in preparing the trip occurred. One Kohl aide, noting the standard line among U.S. officials that they were "following the wishes of our host," declared acidly: "The White House just told the manure wagon to unload at our back door."

Far more important, the Bitburg episode cut deep into the veneer of postwar friendships. Commented Rome's La Repubblica: "The effect has been diametrically opposite to what Reagan and also Kohl had anticipated, leading to the resurgence of old tensions." Up to a point, however, such dredgings can serve as useful reminders of grievances below the surface. Invoking the spirit of West Germany's first postwar Chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung editorialized: "You cannot have both good Germans in the alliance and bad Germans as a standard of depravity. That would not only split West Germany but also deprive the alliance of the tacit understanding on which Adenauer's decision for the West was based: that the past is past."

Whatever strains were placed on the Washington-Bonn alliance, they did not extend noticeably to the first-name working relationship that Reagan has established with Kohl. As they greeted each other warmly at the Chancellery, Reagan managed to get off a joke, this one about a theft in the Kremlin. What turned out to be missing, said the President, was "next year's election results." Kohl announced that if the President ran for office in West Germany, "he would be elected with a large majority." One U.S. participant in the talks said, however, that "nothing" new was brought up in the discussions, mainly because the two leaders wanted to get Bitburg behind them before moving on to other business. U.S. officials calculated the upside in another way. Said one American diplomat: "In a nutshell, Kohl really owes us one, and Germans on the official level know that."

There was disagreement over whether Bitburg had hurt the alliance as a whole. Said one U.S. diplomat: "Not only have we not achieved a symbol of reconciliation, but we've cast doubt on something that everyone had counted on for years as a firm friendship." Others were not so sure about the long-range effects. Said a Kohl aide: "We still need each other." One consequence is almost sure to linger, a politically weakened Kohl. Admitted this official: "There will be some wonder over whether this Chancellor is really such a good crisis manager."

Reagan is also likely to emerge from the controversy slightly battered. His staff turned in less than stellar performances in preparing and bringing off the trip. Chief of Staff Donald Regan, though brand-new to the White House when the early planning occurred, failed to recognize the seriousness of the Bitburg blunder and to cut the President's losses. Assistant Secretary of State Richard Burt, who is expected to be nominated as the next U.S. Ambassador to West Germany, embarrassed U.S. officials in Bonn by walking out on a press briefing. Evidently angered by a couple of interruptions in his presentation of a paraphrase of Kohl's remarks, Burt said a curt goodbye and left the room.

The case of the White House communications director, Patrick Buchanan, was stranger still. NBC News Correspondent Marvin Kalb reported that at a White House meeting with Jewish leaders about Reagan's Sunday itinerary, Buchanan was seen repeatedly scribbling the phrase "succumbing to the pressure of the Jews" in his notebook. Kalb's report implied that the former conservative columnist was jotting down his own views. Buchanan, who has declined to speak openly with the press since taking his White House job in February, temporarily broke his silence to call any such implication "misleading" and "downright silly."

Beyond personnel problems, Reagan faces the threat of a slowdown in his own political momentum. The eloquence of his Sunday speeches, on which he personally labored for many hours, could make up for the fact that Reagan had run into one of the major storms of his political life. And it came at a particularly bad time. Shortly before leaving for Europe the President had suffered a significant congressional defeat in his campaign to provide aid for the Nicaraguan contras, and his popularity rating dipped noticeably in the last job-performance polls. With his big legislative battles over the budget and tax reform still in front of him, Reagan had doubtless hoped that an interlude of high-visibility statecraft in Europe would provide a boost to his domestic standing. The Bitburg fiasco did precisely the opposite, causing unwelcome distractions and unnecessary embarrassments. The episode could hardly bring the Reaganaut march to a halt, but it will make the going harder.

With reporting by Laurence I. Barrett with Reagan and William McWhirter/Bonn