Even those at the top of their game confront demons. So it was last Thursday afternoon for German Chancellor Helmut Kohl.
At the same moment Chicago Mayor Richard Daley was again battling subject-verb agreement during a National Press Club speech, one of Europe’s most underrated figures was a short hop away, fending off calories.
“I will only indulge a bit since I was at Filomena,” said Kohl, whose physique resembles a light bulb atop a cement mixer. He’d make a $1,000 suit look like a mail-order tent.
He was referring to dinner the night before with President Clinton at a favorite haunt, a rather average Italian restaurant where the duo once scarfed down so much food, the media dispensed with political punditry and beckoned nutritionists for their analysis.
Indeed, CNN tried to beat a dead ravioli Thursday morning, seeking on-air counsel from an Atlanta dietitian about the previous evening’s fare. A free press is nothing if not repetitive.
A more enduring Washington tradition played out at the Watergate Hotel, namely an insider’s briefing from a prominent figure. It’s an exercise not well known to county board reporters.
These tend to be off the record, or “on background,” constituting a conspiracy joyfully engaged in by capital newsmakers and their chroniclers. There are limits to the truths dispensed to the unwashed news consumer.
Longtime columnist Robert Novak was joined by me and reporters from CNN, The Baltimore Sun, The Washington Post, Time magazine and the Los Angeles Times.
Kohl came with aides, including his interpreter, a Barbara Feldon lookalike and the only woman in a gathering of 14.
Kohl noted the male-female ratio, then with half-smile and mock chagrin predicted, “The men (reporters in the room) will now all look gloomy, deploring the situation.”
As waiters served salad and a California white wine, the man whose 14-year tenure is the longest for a post-World War II German chancellor, sipped Perrier, fingered a packet of sugar and dispensed with nourishment. Notorious for excess, he exhibited Teutonic self-discipline.
We munched, and he opined with the experience and certitude of someone who has dealt with three American presidents, four Russian presidents and eight Japanese prime ministers.
Reagan, Bush, Mitterrand, Thatcher, Gorbachev and China’s Deng Xiaoping among others, have departed. He remains, relishing politics. “I enjoy beating the heck out of the socialists,” said the aggressively centrist Kohl, who dissected members of the just-elected French government as Richie Daley might the Chicago City Council.
Sure, sure, he said, he knows the new foreign minister. The guy advised the late Mitterrand and is chummy with Kohl’s own foreign policy specialist. “It’s like a carousel,” he said of the French government.
Kohl, 67 and as pale as any resident of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, once was labeled a small-town hick. Times change. The esteemed Economist newsweekly now writes that he is “a leader who at first looked cloddishly ordinary and has grown extraordinary, all the while retaining a quality of solid averageness that invites popular trust.”
Clinton should envy the guy. Just think:
People trust him. More telling, Kohl will make a mark in ways a history-obsessed Clinton can only dream; first by overseeing the tricky unification of East and West Germany, now by leading the way in forging the potential political and economic union of Europe.
He was peppered with an hour’s worth of micro-foreign policy queries– about tension between him and the German central bank, the recent French elections, relations with Iran, Bosnia and expansion of NATO.
Will the Dayton accords really work in Bosnia? This is a 700-year-old mess, he noted. “You have the religious controversies, ethnic strife. As I see it, there’s no alternative to Dayton,” he said with a certain world-weariness. It’s better than nothing.
He fingered the sugar, had coffee and took good-natured jabs at the U.S. He said he wasn’t sure what our China “policy” even is. On NATO expansion, he argued that the Pentagon exaggerates the costs of military expansion for new members, creating needless anxiety in a U.S. Congress that must approve expansion.
So many of his concerns are of scant interest to an isolated, self-satisfied American public. Not even the event that brought him to Washington–the 50th anniversary of the Marshall Plan–elicits much attention.
“We almost starved. It seemed as if we had no future. . . . Then the Marshall Plan was announced,” he recalled of his days as a poor teenager in post-war Germany.
While the newsies turned to salmon, cucumber salad, asparagus and red potatoes, he noted that two-thirds of Germans were born after the Marshall Plan. Members of the ruling Bundestag have a tenuous grasp of history too.
He mentioned the short-range Lance missiles targeted toward the Eastern European Warsaw Pact countries by NATO in the 1980s. If he locked the Bundestag in a room, gave them a test and forbade them from cheating, most couldn’t answer what Lance was, he said ruefully.
I spoke up and mentioned that Americans are far less interested in anything he had discussed–be it Bosnia, China or Iran–than in the Paula Jones lawsuit against Clinton.
His response was rather skillful and, in its way, supportive of Clinton, his flawed friend.
He mentioned Woodrow Wilson. Yes, he was brainy but “whether his policies proved farsighted was another matter.”
Then there was Harry Truman, who oversaw the Marshall Plan. “He was no professor. But he understood what history was about.”
When “God’s cloak” comes your way, he said paraphrasing Otto von Bismarck, one must seize the hem. It doesn’t matter how impressive your resume is, you either grab greatness or you don’t. (I immediately thought to myself that Clinton grabs hems but not greatness.)
On only one matter did Kohl seem unconvincing: Immigration. It’s a huge quandary in Germany and prompts Kohl to take a tough line on granting citizenship to new immigrants.
The CNN reporter, Ralph Begleiter, noted that Kohl’s son may marry a Turk (there are 3 million in Germany). As things stand now, she couldn’t become a German citizen. Kohl launched into a Clintonesque monologue, straining to note the perils of excess immigration and the burden on the German economy.
“There must be a ceiling. But we must come to a sensible solution, though the German people are not xenophobic. We are living beyond our means.”
He was better on China’s desire to stifle its citizens but maintain increasingly free markets. We were clearly privy to the major leagues of name-dropping as Kohl recounted how he passed along to Deng a chat with Gorbachev.
Kohl remembered telling Gorbachev, “You send a man to the moon, then he goes back to his hometown and can’t elect his mayor. Do you think this will work out?”
Kohl didn’t and doesn’t. Nor does he think that Germany, Europe’s top dog, can go it alone, despite its current prosperity and peace. Yes, it’s doing well now. However, its own history suggests how fragile things can be.
If re-elected to another term, he’ll have served longer than even Bismarck, who never stood for election. That would be security, though at lunch’s end, he spoke enviously of Bismarck.
The diaries of Bismarck indicate he took at least four months’ vacation a year. “A poor idiot like me has to steal every hour he gets away from politics,” Kohl said. But Bismarck was even luckier.
“No telephones. (He didn’t have) this idiotic device, the cellular phone.”
Forget German unification and European union. If Kohl could do away with cell phones, his place in history would be set.
