Word: bitburg
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...directions. Instead of revitalizing his capable team of advisers, Reagan let it break up, and then lost more time as Donald Regan settled in as the new chief of staff. The President stirred a storm of controversy in May by insisting on visiting a German military cemetery at Bitburg where SS officers were buried. He and his Administration were also diverted by situations beyond their control: the hostage crisis in Beirut, the operation to remove a cancerous polyp from his colon...
...Mengele is indeed dead, the discovery will, in a way, bring an end to an era -- even though the troubling ghosts of World War II still arouse violent feelings, as evidenced most recently by the controversy over President Reagan's visit to the German war cemetery at Bitburg. For many Germans, Mengele, a top physician at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Poland, embodies a dark past they are hoping at last to exorcise and bury. By the same token, the Mengele hunters and the survivors of the Holocaust, in which some 10 million people were killed, have mixed feelings...
...between Chief of Staff Baker and Treasury Secretary Regan, wasted time that could have been spent exploiting Reagan's re-election momentum. Congress handcuffed the President on aid to the contras in Nicaragua, MX missile deployment and his defense buildup. Reagan's visit to a German military cemetery in Bitburg raised a storm of criticism at home and abroad. No breakthrough on arms control is in sight, and a summit meeting with Soviet Leader Mikhail Gorbachev seems to be drifting into limbo. Tax reform, says former Democratic National Chairman Robert Strauss, "is the best thing Ronald Reagan has going...
...launching a high-visibility crusade for tax reform, Reagan hopes to regain his political momentum and divert attention from a series of setbacks that began with his trip to the grave sites of Nazi soldiers at Bitburg. Congress is proving increasingly contrary: the House last week roundly rejected his compromise budget plan, restoring Social Security increases and cutting defense. Says one top aide: "If we didn't have a tax-reform project, we'd need to create one, just to get the President out on the offensive...
Although the Chancellor campaigned actively throughout the state, his personal popularity apparently wrought no magic. Reagan's Bitburg visit probably did not harm the Chancellor's cause, but it certainly did not help as much as Kohl had hoped. The defeat also betrayed a widespread impatience that the Chancellor's long-promised economic Wende, or turnaround, has not fully materialized; indeed, in February, national unemployment soared to a postwar high of 10.6%. To make matters worse, Kohl's protege, Bernhard Worms, was trounced in the race for North Rhine-Westphalia state leader by Incumbent Johannes Rau. With his moderate views...