Word: bonne
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Scores of high-ranking guests attending the funeral of Konrad Adenauer were posing for pictures outside Bonn's Villa Hammerschmidt, the official home of German Presidents. Suddenly a photographer asked Lyndon Johnson to shake hands with Charles de Gaulle. A moment of embarrassed silence. Then Johnson instinctively smiled and reached out his hand. The imperious French President, whose relations with the U.S. have been steadily cooling, did likewise, and the two hands hovered in a brief clasp. The two men had just started to withdraw their hands when West German President Heinrich Lübke, as if alarmed that...
...most satisfactory handshake in history, nor did it carry any special significance. But it was better than nothing. It was, in fact, much like the funeral gathering in the distinctly nonmetropolitan city of Bonn, which had never before played host at once to so many of the free world's great and near great. No major decisions were made and no declarations issued, but the sad occasion did give the West's leaders a chance to talk with one another...
...they wanted someone more tractable than the strong-willed Adenauer. The experience, der Alte acidly reminded the British, was not a new one for him. Cologne's loss was Germany's gain; he entered national politics with the joung Christian Democratic Party, in 1949 squeaked in as Bonn's first Chancellor by a single-vote majority...
...Western community of nations. Like John Foster Dulles, U.S. Secretary of State at the time, der Alte saw Communism as an implacable threat to his Christian conception of Western civilization. Dulles and Adenauer became fast friends. As with no other American diplomat, Adenauer felt that Dulles always told Bonn the truth. Dulles was, in fact, the statesman der Alte most admired be cause "he thought clearly, thought ahead, and he kept his promises...
...recent years, der Alte came to mistrust American policy around the world. He wanted the U.S. to withdraw from Viet Nam, believing that it was diluting Washington's interest in Bonn and Europe. Every fresh move toward détente with Russia added to his unease about the course of Atlantic affairs. Much of his unseemly sniping at his successor, Ludwig Erhard, stemmed from his worry that Erhard was too uncritically-and undemandingly-pro-American...