Word: erhards
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...Spiegel on flimsy charges of treason. Strauss was the key man in selecting Kiesinger as the Christian Democrats' candidate for Chancellor, will make his comeback as Minister of Finance in the new government. The other is Gerhard Schroder, 56, who moved from his post as Foreign Minister under Erhard to take on the controversial and besieged position of Defense Minister. Strauss is a Catholic and a Gaullist who blames Schröder for Germany's strained relations with France; Schroder is a Protestant and Atlanticist who fears that the burly Bavarian may endanger West Germany's strong ties with...
...would withdraw their troops or permit Germany to become an initial atomic battlefield in any war. The abandonment of the multilateral force and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara's insistence that Germany buy huge amounts of military equipment from the U.S.?an insistence that helped to bring down the Erhard government?are galling. "We have bought so much U.S. military equipment," says one German official in Washington, "that we now have a machine gun on every desk." To add to all the other frustrations, the German economy, which is still growing at a healthy but decreased rate...
...Dirty Hands. From his office in Baden-Würtemberg, Kiesinger watched the prestige of Ludwig Erhard's government gradually deteriorating. Konrad Adenauer had warned that Erhard would be politically unskilled as Chancellor, but just about everyone put that down to an old man's churlishness. When Erhard took over in 1963, it proved all too true. Though smart, sincere and honest, Erhard did not care to dirty his hands in the invariable give-and-take of political battle. He expected the voters to follow him out of gratitude, and for a while they did. But politicians seldom survive long...
...wrong. The Luftwaffe's Starfighters rained down from the skies, generals resigned, a U-boat sank, prices rose. Worst of all, estimates for the 1967 budget showed a $1.5 billion deficit, largely because of huge purchases of U.S. weaponry. By law, German budgets must balance. So in September, Erhard flew off to Washington in hopes that President Johnson would agree to a reduction of the arms purchases, which were intended to offset the cost of maintaining U.S. Forces in West Germany. President Johnson plainly decided that the U.S. needed the deutsche marks more than Erhard needed help. As Erhard jetted...
...plotters, the opportunity to pull the rug out from under Erhard came in late October, when he tried to persuade the Free Democrat members of his coalition Cabinet to go along with the tax increase required to balance next year's budget. In the end, stung by accounts that they were caving in to Erhard, the Free Democrats chose to save face by quitting the Cabinet and taking their 49 seats in the Bundestag along with them. Erhard was thus left with West Germany's first minority government. His position was untenable; but who would succeed...