Word: bitburg
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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...
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...
...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...
...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...