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Poland is a case in point. The riots that toppled Wladyslaw Gomulka are plainly attributable to a combination of badly timed rises in food prices and public disgust over the country's stagnating economy (see THE WORLD). Even so, hard-liners from East Berlin to Moscow are certain to point to Warsaw's recent rapprochement with Bonn as an important cause. That may well slow the momentum of Brandt's diplomacy, but it is unlikely to stymie it completely. Opposed to the hard-liners in practically every Politburo in the East bloc are pragmatists who see detente as a lesser threat to their control than continued economic difficulties. These men argue that the only way to avoid Polish-style explosions is to secure more Western technological and economic help in order to revitalize their sagging economies and give their people a better life.
Thus, Brandt has confronted the Communist leaders with a quandary—and they have convened no fewer than four summit meetings in the past 13 months in an effort to solve it. He is wagering that he can unfreeze relations in Central Europe without compromising the integrity of West Berlin or future West German governments. He believes that the Western system is sufficiently superior and attractive to influence Communism toward acquiring a less belligerent and rigid nature. Brandt may be wrong in thinking that he can affect the evolution of Communism. It is already clear, however, that he has set in motion developments that are certain to have profound effects. As Jean Monnet, Europe's Grand Old Man, told Brandt recently: "I did not think that you would get so much done in so short a time." BROAD DESIGN. He had no overwhelming mandate to act so fast or so boldly. His election as West Germany's first Social Democratic Chancellor in October 1969 was a marginal victory. His party and its coalition partner, the tiny Free Democrats, have a bare six-seat majority in the Bundestag. West Germans still have decidedly mixed and suspicious feelings toward Brandt, who regularly runs behind other Social Democrats in opinion polls. With his husky (5 ft. 101 in., 200 Ibs.) good looks, he strikes many people as a friendly, shambling bear. But he is a hard man to know, intensely moody and withdrawn. His deeply-lined face and his nervous habit of snapping wooden kitchen matches between his fingers testify to an inner tension that he tries hard to keep from surfacing.
Brandt made his reputation as a brave mayor in West Berlin in the late 1950s, but in two successive campaigns in the 1960s, he was crushingly defeated as the Social Democrats' candidate for Chancellor. He had too many strikes against him, it seemed: his apparent political immaturity in contrast to the father image of Konrad Adenauer, West Germany's first Chancellor; his record as an exile who sat out the war years in Scandinavian safety and returned to beaten Berlin in the uniform of a Norwegian major; his illegitimate birth. After those two