Word: germanically
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...President listened in tight-lipped concentration as the thin, wispy-haired writer graciously accepted his medal, handed it to his son Elisha, 12, and then turned to the sensitive topic everyone present had awaited: Reagan's intention to visit a West German cemetery at Bitburg, where 47 of the Third Reich's notorious Waffen SS troops, as well as some 2,000 regular German soldiers, lie buried. As criticism mounted, Reagan had belatedly added a concentration camp to his itinerary next month in West Germany, where he will help Chancellor Helmut Kohl observe the 40th anniversary of the ending...
...mastery of public relations and for a President who has shown great skill in the use of symbolic gestures, the task should have been fairly routine. Instead, a series of staff miscues and a lack of sensitivity by the President not only cast a pall over his German trip, they managed to stir up all the old wartime passions that Reagan had hoped to put to rest. As the furor over the Bitburg cemetery visit escalated for more than a week, he seemed unable to understand the emotions that he had aroused and, instead of recovering, slid more deeply into...
...result was anger from almost every quarter. West German officials felt the White House had trampled the feelings of a nation still torn by guilt over Nazi atrocities. Complained one of Kohl's closest aides: "Our friends overseas have to make up their minds whether we are friends, fighting shoulder and shoulder together, or whether we are just the offspring of Nazis." In the U.S. and Israel, in the very week that poignant Holocaust remembrances were being held, Jewish leaders were outraged at what they considered Reagan's lack of appreciation of the Nazi horrors. They were mystified...
Editorially, few U.S. newspapers defended the President's West German itinerary. "The victims and the butchers of Nazism are not equatable," observed the New York Times. Suggested the Boston Globe: "If Jimmy Carter or Walter Mon-dale had so ... befouled the dignity of the presidency . . . ridicule and sarcasm from right-wing sermonizers would still be echoing." But the press assault on the trip was not unanimous. "That some of the men buried at Bitburg were members of the SS . . . does not make the visit less proper," argued the Houston Post. "Those men are dead, killed fighting as regular troops . . . Death...
...visited the White House last November. While there has been much confusion and some dispute between the two capitals over just what was said between Reagan and the Chancellor, there is no doubt that Kohl made an emotional appeal for the President to join him in appearing at a German military cemetery. Kohl had clasped hands on Sept. 22 with France's President François Mitterrand at a World War I cemetery in Verdun, where German as well as French soldiers are buried, and had found it a gratifying experience. Kohl mentioned Bitburg as a likely site for a similar...