Tough Too

In Washington last week Secretary of State Christian Herter won headlines by saying that Nikita Khrushchev was hardening his stand on West Berlin. But so, too, though Herter failed to mention it, was West Germany's Chancellor Konrad Adenauer.

Adenauer has become increasingly resentful of what he considers U.S. and British indifference to persistent Soviet attempts to persuade the world that the Berlin question is the only obstacle to East-West harmony. Bitterly, Adenauer points out that, while Khrushchev preaches "relaxation of tensions" everywhere else, he loses no opportunity to vilify West Germany. In their latest exchange of notes, Khrushchev compared Adenauer to Hitler in three separate passages, accused the West German government of encouraging anti-Semitism and plotting war.

Worse yet, Adenauer is deeply suspicious that the U.S. and Britain are resigned to accepting eventual East German control of the land routes to West Berlin. Fortnight ago, acting with West Berlin's Socialist Mayor Willy Brandt, Adenauer presented Western summit planners with a memorandum declaring that West Berlin is legally a state of the West German Federal Republic. The implication: West Germany has the right to veto any summit decision on Berlin that the Germans find unacceptable. But the Anglo-American view of Berlin's status is that their own rights as World War II victors constitute the only Western legal claim to maintain garrisons in Berlin.

Willy Brandt is more tactful, but just as insistent, in pressing West Germany's claim. Says he: "The word 'veto' overplays the whole thing. West Germany is part of the Western community. It is normal for the Western powers not to make a decision about a German city without the approval of the German government. If they did otherwise, there would be very deplorable consequences."

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