Better Now

Tension over Berlin was clearly easing last week. Not since the building of Walter Ulbricht's ugly Wall last summer had the city been so calmly sure that it would survive, free. The calm may be shattered again any day the Russians choose to get nasty, but in the West Berlin senate last week Mayor Willy Brandt proclaimed flatly that the Communists' war of nerves had failed.

All the signs, Brandt maintained, show-that the shock and dismay caused by the Wall had begun to wear off. West Berlin's industrial production, said Brandt, is higher than it was a year ago, incoming orders exceed those of October 1960, and employment is on the rise; tax revenues are increasing steadily and savings accounts are satisfactory. After West Berlin's 1958 crisis, Brandt continued, it took seven months before bank deposits returned to normal; today deposits are bouncing back far faster. Some of the signs cited by Brandt may be the result of artificial respiration. More important, the outflow of industry and individuals has at last been stanched; more people, he said, are now coming into West Berlin to settle than are leaving.

Calculated Leak. Another sign that the heat is temporarily off is Nikita Khrushchev's apparent new willingness to diminish his menaces. At a Kremlin reception, Khrushchev told correspondents that "for the time being, it is not good for Russia and the U.S. to push one another." In a well-planted leak to West German Ambassador Hans Kroll last week, Khrushchev tentatively offered the West a set of modified proposals to end the crisis.

The Soviet Premier said once again that Russia is ready for a new agreement on the status of West Berlin that would guarantee freedom of its inhabitants and the West's right of free access. Khrushchev then pledged to make East Germany respect these guarantees, if the West would in turn respect the sovereignty of East Germany. He skirted his objections to West Berlin's continued political and economic ties with West Germany, so Western diplomats remained wary.

No Bloody Noses. In West Berlin Bierstuben, the man most credited with boosting the morale of West Berliners is the hero of the 1948 airlift, Special Presidential Envoy Lucius D. Clay, 64, who has become the image of a calm and determined U.S. in Berlin. He has toured East Berlin, passed through the Friedrichstrasse checkpoint, examined the Wall with minute care. He helicoptered to Steinstuecken, a little enclave just over the West Berlin border that nevertheless belongs to the U.S. sector. Everywhere West Berliners cheer him. All this is calculated to show that the U.S. will not be pushed around by the Russians. "If we are pushed around and harassed," says Clay, "we have to do a bit of pushing and harassing ourselves."

At the same time Clay is determined to ward off "unnecessary bloody noses." Fortnight ago. Clay sent M48 Patton tanks to Checkpoint Charlie on the Friedrichstrasse to reinforce the right of U.S. civilians to enter East Berlin without showing their identification to the Volkspolizei. When Russian tanks faced up to the Pattons on the other side of the border. Clay ordered the U.S. tanks back. The U.S. State Department, which feels its authority over Clay to be vague, was in a flap about the incident, but Clay remained calm. "The whole exercise was over when the Soviet tanks showed up," he explained neatly last week. "We set out to bring Russian tanks up as an admission that the Soviet Union was responsible for East Berlin and that it was the Soviet Union that was denying us access."

Only the West. Once this was accomplished. Clay says he prescribed "self-denial" and guarded against further moves-that might provoke the Russians: "You just do not take actions from which you might have to back down." But behind this prudence remains a strong streak of the practical soldier. Berliners noted that each of the Patton tanks rolled up to the Friedrichstrasse sported bulldozer blades, speculated that if the tanks had gone across the border to assert U.S. rights, they were equipped to smash down the Wall on the way.

Clay questions the latter-day notion that the West should have torn down the Wall as soon as it went up on Aug. 13. "When people talk like that, they should remember exactly what our commitment in Berlin is," he says. "We are not responsible for Berlin as a whole. We are responsible only for the independence, security and well-being of West Berlin; East Berlin is a Soviet responsibility. The Berlin airlift, for example, was not for all of Berlin but for West Berlin only. The Wall is terrible, but the solemn commitments of the U.S. are only to West Berlin. I am convinced that if we keep West Berlin free, strong and independent, the Wall cannot stand."

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