Word: chancellor
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Last week Schmidt was preparing to fly to the U.S. for a four-day "private" visit that would include an important bit of unofficial summitry in Washington. President Carter has scheduled roughly three hours of talks with the Chancellor, who will also meet with congressional leaders and breakfast with National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski. In addition, the U.S. public will be able to take the Chancellor's measure when he fans out to give three major speeches in his fluent, almost unaccented English: at Columbia, S.C., where he will attend a centennial celebration for the late former Secretary of State...
...could over the past 2% years." The President and the Chancellor have had a severe "chemistry" problem. As one White House official puts it, "The two get along when they are together; the problem is when they're apart...
...Even the Chancellor's closest supporters admit he has a vanity and impatience that can blister into arrogance. In his clockwork Cabinet meetings, he thinks nothing of cutting off the first digression with a knifing "That's not pertinent!" He once complained about Ludwig Erhard, who succeeded Adenauer as Chancellor, that "talking with him is like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall...
...elected to the Bundestag. In 1969, after two years as S.P.D. Bundestag floor leader, he entered Brandt's national Cabinet as Defense Minister. By the time Brandt began to lose his political authority Schmidt was West Germany's internationally regarded Finance Minister and the Chancellor's increasingly powerful standin. "When occasionally Willy wouldn't show up, it seemed perfectly natural that Helmut would take over the sessions," a Cabinet colleague recalls. Just as naturally, when Brandt resigned after the Guillaume scandal, Schmidt took over as Chancellor...
Schmidt is almost as popular in other Western European countries as at home. Nonetheless, there is a lingering fear behind lots of closed government doors that the Chancellor just might be, or become, too strong; that the goblins of West Germany's past could emerge to influence its Continental behavior. Other Europeans still have deep memories of the Germany of the past and, fairly or not, wonder if the new West Germany ever acts entirely in the present...