ABSTRACT
An increasingly close campaign to elect a new US President in the midst of the second Berlin crisis could not possibly fail to elicit Willy Brandt’s interest as Mayor of Berlin and Social Democratic candidate for Chancellor. Berlin had to be the first question on his mind, but whereas he was anxious about the possible consequences of the ultimately abortive Paris summit in May 1960, the run-up to a change of administration in Washington was no cause of concern. Neither candidate worried him, but it was the Kennedy, not the Nixon campaign, that increasingly interested Brandt and on which he and the Social Democrats focused their attempts to establish early contacts. The first of these was indirect and originated not from Brandt, but from the SPD’s other foreign policy expert with personal contacts to the United States, Fritz Erler, who provided Kennedy’s campaign team with a memorandum on Germany and Berlin that finally ended up on the desk of John Kenneth Galbraith, then serving as the economic coordinator in Kennedy’s campaign staff.2
