Word: v-e
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While Paris erupted with fireworks, flowers and music on V-E day, West Germany's Bundestag, not surprisingly, voted down any German notation of the anniversary. "We truly have no occasion to celebrate this day," said Chancellor Ludwig Erhard in a moving speech. "The guilt and fate of this epoch of our history will not leave us for generations." Moscow, however, was determined to rub it in on the West Germans. Premier Aleksei Kosygin flew to East Berlin to join Puppet Walter Ulbricht and Poland's Premier Jozef Cyrankiewicz in a parade of thousands of Russian and East...
...political feet again. Even in his insistence on a measure of economic and military autonomy from the U.S. for a united Europe, De Gaulle would have considerable logic on his side if he were not the chief obstacle to unity. But as Lyndon Johnson observed in his own V-E day message to Europe, "There are some efforts today to replace partnership with suspicion, and the drive toward unity with a policy of division...
Lyndon Johnson immediately grasped the significance and potential of Early Bird, the new communications satellite hovering 22,300 miles above the equator. Aware that the Russians were flooding European TV stations with films and pictures for the 20th anniversary of V-E day, the President acted swiftly last week to upstage them...
...meet at the White House to complain about the President's increasing pre-emption of prime TV time on short notice. Instead of a meeting, Johnson produced a new short-notice request. As soon as possible, he said, he wanted to use Early Bird to broadcast a V-E anniversary speech direct to Europe. Three and one-half hours later, in a slow and measured drawl, he was chiding Charles de Gaulle live on British and Italian TV screens, and being taped for later rebroadcast in almost every other European nation...
...Generation. Fact is, 55% of West Germany's population today were under 25 years of age on V-E day, and the new generation hardly feels responsible for the sins of its elders. What does concern Germans of all ages is an increasing desire to assert a national identity, hardly a novel emotion. Polls show that reunification is a burning question for a majority of West Germans. Obviously, the lack of real nationhood could give the spark of opportunity to precisely the kind of German ultranationalism that the world learned to dread in two world wars...