Willy Brandt - Politician

Politician

From 3 October 1957, to 1966, Willy Brandt was Mayor of West Berlin, during a period of increasing tension in East-West relations that led to the construction of the Berlin Wall. In Brandt's first year as Mayor, he also served as the President of the Bundesrat in Bonn. Brandt was outspoken against the Soviet repression of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and against Nikita Khrushchev's 1958 proposal that Berlin receive the status of a "free city". He was supported by the influential publisher Axel Springer. As Mayor of West Berlin, Brandt accomplished much in the way of urban development. New hotels, office-blocks and flats were constructed, while both Schloss Charlottenburg and the Reichstag were restored. Sections of the "Stadtring" Bundesautobahn 100 inner-city motorway were opened, while a major housing programme was carried out, with roughly 20,000 new dwellings built each year during his time in office.

At the start of 1961, U.S. President John F. Kennedy saw Brandt as the wave of the future in West Germany and was hoping he would replace Konrad Adenauer as chancellor following elections later in the year. Kennedy made this preference clear by inviting Brandt, the West German opposition leader, to an official meeting at the White House a month before meeting with Adenauer, the country’s leader. The diplomatic snub strained relations between Kennedy and Adenauer further during an especially tense time for Berlin. However, following the building of the Berlin Wall in August 1961, Brandt was disappointed and angry with Kennedy. Speaking in Berlin three days later, Brandt criticized Kennedy, asserting "Berlin expects more than words. It expects political action." He also wrote Kennedy a highly critical public letter in which he warned that the development was liable "to arouse doubts about the ability of the three Powers to react and their determination" and he called the situation "a state of accomplished extortion"."

Brandt became the Chairman of the SPD in 1964, a post that he retained until 1987, longer than any other party Chairman since its foundation by August Bebel. Brandt was the SPD candidate for the Chancellorship in 1961, but he lost to Konrad Adenauer's conservative Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU). In 1965, Brandt ran again, but lost to the popular Ludwig Erhard. Erhard's government was short-lived, however, and in 1966 a grand coalition between the SPD and CDU was formed, with Brandt as Foreign Minister and Vice-Chancellor.