ABSTRACT
From the middle of April onwards, Kennedy gradually began to look less dazzling. Adenauer followed Brandt to Washington, and through party channels Brandt received a confidential report full of wild disinformation about the visit. According to this piece, Kennedy was supposed to have told Adenauer straight out that he officially wanted to do away with German reunification, that the superpowers should officially renounce any claims to any German territory (i.e. Germany as a whole), which would eventually lead to the recognition of the GDR, while the Berlin problem would have to be solved with a ‘Free City’ West Berlin. In essence, this was the Eastern position, and objectively this had nothing whatsoever to do with the actual course of Adenauer’s conversations in the United States. Even without access to more accurate information, Brandt must have recognized this as bogus, not least because it was perfectly clear that if this had been remotely true, Adenauer would have hit the roof (rather than, as the report ludicrously claimed, telling Kennedy that there would be no domestic problem with giving up on reunification). In fact the Chancellor returned with a transient confidence in Kennedy. But the proverb suggests that there is no smoke without fire, and thus even obvious fabrications can have a habit of sticking in the mind.2
