Foreign News: The Hard Bargainer

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Adenauer was taken aback. Mendès shrugged. It had to be, he insisted. Adenauer objected that his coalition leaders would never agree in effect to muzzle German parties and newspapers. Ask them, suggested Mendès. Adenauer said he would see them when he got back to Bonn, and let Mendès know. That would not do, said Mendès; he had to know this week. Adenauer agreed to summon his coalition leaders to Paris.

Before breaking up for dinner, Mendès asked when Adenauer was returning to Bonn. Probably Saturday night, said Adenauer. "Oh, hell," said Mendès. "That means we've got to get this agreement on the Saar by Saturday then." Mendès likes deadlines, and Adenauer understood: if he did not agree to a Saar solution by Saturday, Mendès would not sign Germany into sovereignty. Der Alte drove back to Paris tired and discouraged. "Many things lie heavily on my heart," he told his aides.

Good Will, Vague Promises. They still lay heavily next day as John Foster Dulles and Sir Anthony Eden flew in for the four-power meeting designed to restore German sovereignty.

But when the Saar was not concerned, Mendès was all reason and optimism. He politely declined the chairmanship of the four-power meeting, saying that this was only a continuation of the London Conference, and Sir Anthony should preside. Soon other diplomats were swarming into Paris (and it took a practiced diplomat to know which was a meeting of the Big Four, the Big Nine, or the Big Fourteen). Smoothly, as if he had not a reservation in the world, Mendès joined with the other four members of the Brussels Treaty, plus Canada and the U.S., to approve the admission of West Germany and Italy into a Western European Union or WEU. And with Dulles and Eden he quickly assented to the legalese worked out by the experts to restore German sovereignty. Mendès turned to Eden, remarked: "You see, I told you yesterday it wouldn't take more than 15 minutes." That night Adenauer returned to his hotel tired but happy. Brussels was settled. Sovereignty was in sight.

But ignored in the atmosphere of good will, a French and a German representative had been haggling all day in the Hotel Bristol over the Saar settlement. The French kept insisting on the word "irrevocable." Adenauer's coalition leaders, arriving from Germany, were firmly opposed to any concession which would permanently detach the Saar from Germany. "I cannot go to my Parliament with some vague promise that we will agree on the Saar sometime in the future," Mendès told Adenauer.

Miracle in Sight. The next day brought the crisis. At breakfast, the German representative told Adenauer that the French would not give an inch. There was no use continuing the haggling. Mendès retorted by summoning his Cabinet, extracting a unanimous declaration of support for his stand. To make his point emphatic, Mendès announced he would not sign anything at all until he had a Saar settlement, proved he meant what he said by refusing to sign a purely procedural letter from the occupying powers to Adenauer.