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Brown Study. At 45, Franz Josef Strauss is a brawny, brawling bull of a Bavarian who symbolizes the unsettling vitality of the new Germany. Rough, ruthless and flamboyant, he bowls over obstacles in his way like a Tiger tank smashing through a Pomeranian pine forest. He is youthful, energetic, smart, unpredictable, corrosively realistic. Strauss is dedicated to NATO. But he is also proud of Germany's new strength. He demands that Germany get the confidence that dedication and strength deserve. Says Strauss: "Either we are admitted as equal partners in NATO or we are not. You cannot have it both ways."
Youngest and toughest member of Adenauer's Cabinet, Strauss is a man most Germans expect will surely rule Germany some day. He looks as German as a stein of beer. A hulking man (5 ft. n in., 190 Ibs.) with the powerful chest of a onetime cycling champion, he walks with the stiff, lurching gait of a Bavarian peasant. His eyes are small and blue, his head square and massive. But inside the square head of this butcher's son is a fantastically retentive brain that gobbles up details of technology and digests the lumpiest government problem.
His father, a staunch Catholic, kept a butcher shop in the Schwabing sector of Munich in the years Naziism got started there. More than once, young Franz Josef wrapped cold cuts for a poultry-breeding patron named Heinrich Himmler. Across from the butcher shop at No. 49 Schelling-strasse, Heinrich Hoffman kept a photographic shop where a frequent visitor was a pale, mustached man named Adolf Hitler. One day when Butcher Strauss caught his son—aged five—handing out pamphlets that some brown shirt had given him, he gave the boy a thrashing right there in the Schellingstrasse. "That," says Franz Josef Strauss, "was my first experience in politics."
Local Gods. The Schwabing sector was a kind of Munich equivalent of Paris' Latin Quarter. Munich's finest university was near by, abstract painters mingled with budding ballerinas, and professors were the local gods. Young Franz Josef might have gone right on cutting Weiss-null and Leberkds all his life if the parish priest had not observed how swiftly the lad caught the meaning of his Latin prayers and helped get him a scholarship at the crack Maximilian Gymnasium.
Franz Josef proved to be a standout student. He won highest prizes in Latin, somewhat offset by his predilection for rowdy pranks, which kept his grades in deportment low and his popularity with fellow students high. He developed a passion for bicycling, once entered a 75-mile cross-country bike race, and won it, earning himself the title of "South German Road Champion." Resisting pressure to join the Nazis, he enrolled himself and his new motorcycle in the innocuous National Socialist Motorized Corps, which was little more than a sports club. At Munich University, he ranked at the top in all examinations, seemed destined for teaching. Even after he was drafted in 1939 and assigned to an antiaircraft unit, he was forever getting leave to take more exams. His academic hopes were smashed when the war wrecked Germany, and even the manuscript of his unfinished thesis ("The Idea of World Empire in Justin's Historiae Philippicae") was burned in a raid that leveled No. 49 Schellingstrasse.