Scores of high-ranking guests attending the funeral of Konrad Adenauer were posing for pictures outside Bonn's Villa Hammerschmidt, the official home of German Presidents. Suddenly a photographer asked Lyndon Johnson to shake hands with Charles de Gaulle. A moment of embarrassed silence. Then Johnson instinctively smiled and reached out his hand. The imperious French President, whose relations with the U.S. have been steadily cooling, did likewise, and the two hands hovered in a brief clasp. The two men had just started to withdraw their hands when West German President Heinrich Lübke, as if alarmed that the handshake had not lasted longer, grabbed both Johnson's and De Gaulle's hands and tried to join them together again. He only managed to get his own hands entwined in a three-way tangle that Charles de Gaulle seemed to find distinctly unamusing.
It was not the most satisfactory handshake in history, nor did it carry any special significance. But it was better than nothing. It was, in fact, much like the funeral gathering in the distinctly nonmetropolitan city of Bonn, which had never before played host at once to so many of the free world's great and near great. No major decisions were made and no declarations issued, but the sad occasion did give the West's leaders a chance to talk with one another.
Pomp & Glory. The two heads of state, twelve prime ministers, 18 foreign ministers and delegations from 53 other countries had come primarily to honor the man whom West Germany buried with the pomp and glory that his achievements warranted. Flanked by flowers, rows of his decorations and a military honor guard, the body of Konrad Adenauer lay in state in Cologne's soaring cathedral. As the country observed seven days of mourning, thousands of Germans, many in black, some weeping, filed past his bier in final tribute.
Television carried the pontifical Requiem Mass throughout Western Europe, beyond the Iron Curtain to Czechoslovakia, by satellite to the U.S. and parts of Asia. After the ceremony, German Catholic and Protestant churchmen and the visiting dignitaries followed the coffin the 385 yards from the cathedral to the Rhine, where it was placed aboard a German navy patrol boat for a 20-mile trip upstream to Adenauer's village of Rhondorf. There, in a private hillside cemetery, his body was lowered into a grave alongside the flower-decked ones of his two wives and infant son.