Word: raab
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Died. Julius Raab, 72, Chancellor of Austria from 1953 to 1961, chief architect of its postwar independence, a lumbering, folksy engineer-turned-politician who in 1955 talked the Soviets into withdrawing troops from their zone of the partitioned country in return for a promise of neutrality, thereafter cut income taxes, stabilized the schilling, turned thriving Austria into a highly persuasive advertisement for capitalism; of a lung embolism; in Vienna...
Molotov stared at Raab through his pince-nez, and let him wait a spell in Moscow. Presently, for reasons that Raab professes still mystify him, the Russians consented to give Austria the state treaty that they had denied it for ten years. Molotov personally went to Vienna to sign the document, and when he did so (with a U.S.-made, gold-plated fountain pen at 11:34 a.m. on May 15, 1955), it marked the apogee of Julius Raab's career...
...neutrality that Raab conceded the Russians (after prior clearance with John Foster Dulles) even proved lucrative. The U.S. has given Austria aid totaling $1,200,000,000 since 1945, and the Russians have countered by permitting the Austrians to keep at least some of the reparations Russia had originally demanded as the price of independence ($152 million in goods plus 1,000,000 tons of Austrian oil annually for ten years). The Russians had nationalized most of the economy in their zone. Though a free-enterpriser by inclination, Raab deferred to his Socialist coalition partners who wanted to keep...
...eight years under Raab, the national income doubled, gold and foreign-exchange reserves rose to $672 million. The tourist industry, Austria's most important, is currently sluicing in wealth at an annual rate of $239 million. Vienna, no longer a divided city, shook off its Third Man atmosphere of shabby spies and furtive black-marketeers, is once again one of Europe's gayest capitals...
...Raab picked and groomed his own successor-jovial, Tyrol-born Alfons Gorbach. 62, a longtime People's Party leader in the province of Styria. Contented Austrians hope that their new Chancellor will keep things pretty much the comfortable way Julius Raab left them...