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Even the Chancellor's closest supporters admit he has a vanity and impatience that can blister into arrogance. In his clockwork Cabinet meetings, he thinks nothing of cutting off the first digression with a knifing "That's not pertinent!" He once complained about Ludwig Erhard, who succeeded Adenauer as Chancellor, that "talking with him is like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall."
Control and practicality are Schmidt's watchwords. Sixteen-hour days of budgeted, systematic labor are normal for him, and he often brings home stacks of buff-colored dossiers to read until two or three in the morning. Even so, Schmidt is what Germans call a "Morgenmuffel," one who hates to get up in the morning. At the London economic summit in 1977, not suspecting that it might further damage their jersonal rapport, Carter invited him to a 7 a.m. breakfast; Schmidt was appalled.
It is a rare occasion when he can relax at home with his wife of 36 years, "Loki." Their modest residence, situated on the Rhine within sight of the I Chancellery, is furnished in modern-functional style and decorated with expressionist and impressionist paintings. Bookcases are filled with volumes on history and economics. Schmidt occasionally relaxes with a mystery story, preferably by Agatha Christie, plays Bach or Mozart on a large electric organ, or challenges his wife at chess and double solitaire. He hates to lose at chess, as well as politics; when he does, he is apt to rail at his own "stupidity" for making the wrong move.
Although no athlete, Schmidt at 60 is vigorous and trim: 5 ft. 8 in., 172 Ibs. A chain-smoker of mentholated cigarettes, he drinks no alcohol except for dutiful sips at a dinner or reception. He never refuses a cigar, however. Devoted to his 90-year-old parents, whom he visits at a home for the elderly near his beloved Hamburg, he unfailingly sticks the proffered cigar in his pocket to take to his father. Schmidt and his wife spend every weekend possible in Hamburg. On summer holidays at their cottage on a lake in northern Germany, they are joined by their only child, Susanne, 31, an economist like her father, who works for the Deutsche Bank branch office in London.
Schmidt originally planned to be an architect. Instead, in 1937 at the age of 18, he was drafted into the Wehrmacht and served with an antiaircraft unit that fought on both the Eastern and Western fronts. After being commissioned a first lieutenant, he was captured at the Battle of the Bulge and held as a prisoner of war for six months in Belgium. Earlier, he had joined the Hitler Youth, as did every other boy in his school. His submissive stance is said to have privately troubled Schmidt in later years. Returning after the war to the devastation of Hamburg, he abandoned architecture to study political economy because, as a friend recalls, "considering the scope of the task of reconstruction, he believed he could be of more use."
In 1949 Schmidt graduated at the top of his class at the