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Since then, he has learned some lessons about international cooperation with the Russians, has acquired along with an Order of Kutuzov (First Class) a good deal of grey hair at his temples. But so, presumably, have his Russian opposite numbers. Together with Colonel Frank Howley, a onetime Philadelphia adman and tough commander of the U.S. sector of Berlin, Clay makes a sharp foil for them.
Howley, perhaps the most flamboyant member of Clay's staff, last week issued a statement that was a hearteningly accurate advertisement of the U.S. position in Berlin: "I don't know where we can go in Europe that Russia could not cut off our supplies. You have to start somewhere with the principle that agreements must be observed. If we want to hold our heads up in Europe, we have to stand firm."
Behind the Lines. It was one of history's consummate ironies that, to stand firm, the West now had to consider the mood and mettle of the Germans. What was the state of the German nation? TIME's Berlin Bureau cabled this report:
"The life of the Soviet zone's 17 million people is most summarily indicated by Berlin's brave fight against being swallowed into Soviet zone darkness. What emerges from that darkness is a grim parade of statistics—a population decline of 85,000 between October 1947 and February 1948; a Soviet loot of capital goods (in the occupation's first year) amounting to $6 billion; reparations from current production averaging $1 billion a year. Police-state methods have 'solved' some problems that still frustrate the West. Whipped by fear, the population works hard, hoards less food, and wastes little time on political discussion. The fact is that the Russians have earned the fear and hate of all except convinced Communists. For this reason, no matter how much they talk of it, the Russians cannot possibly agree to truly free elections in a unified Germany.
"In Western Germany this week there are brighter signs of health and hope than at any time since the Third Reich's death. The new Western German currency (TIME, June 28) has brought a new spirit. Shop windows are suddenly crammed with goods—pots, pans, gay summer prints, electric irons, lawnmowers, typewriters, clocks—and clerks have become courteous. Farmers no longer hoard their food but bring it to town markets. In the midst of all this, General Clay and the other Western occupation chiefs last week submitted to German leaders the recent Six-Power London Agreement plans for a Western German constituent assembly. The Germans sat through the proceedings poker-faced, promised a reply later on.
"German politicians, afraid of being labeled 'agents of the occupation,' still do not provide leadership. It is difficult to set democratic wheels in motion within the big, necessarily authoritarian occupation machine. A similar situation exists in the economy, which is too controlled to be free and yet too free to be planned.