Reagan’s Problem Bitburg--How Lasting the Uproar?

Even before he and his family flew home from a Passover visit to Israel last week, 37-year-old former law professor Marshall Breger knew it was going to be bad.

As President Reagan’s special assistant for public liaison with Jewish groups, Breger was besieged by horrified Israeli associates when they learned that Reagan planned to visit a West German military cemetery containing the graves of Nazi storm troopers.

“It was a tremendous outburst, more in pain than in anger,” said Berger, who has worked nonstop, 18 hours a day trying to assuage the feelings of American Jews since returning to his office in the Old Executive Office Building adjacent to the White House.

‘Tough Couple of Weeks’

Breger is not alone in his discomfort. With the Bitburg cemetery controversy still escalating, Congress shunning Reagan’s pleas for continued military aid to the anti-Sandinista rebels in Nicaragua, the deficit soaring and the economy beginning to sputter, the President is having what Sen. Paul Laxalt (R-Nev.) called “a tough couple of weeks.”

Laxalt, Reagan’s close friend and 1984 campaign chairman, insisted that “we’re not at the hand-wringing stage,” but other Republicans--including some members of the White House staff--are not so sure. After more than four years of reigning supreme in Washington as the “great communicator,” they fear that Reagan may have stumbled into the kind of symbolic trouble that has brought lasting grief to other presidents.

The furor over Reagan’s insistence on carrying through his plan for a May 5 wreath-laying ceremony at West Germany’s Bitburg military cemetery comes at a time when the Administration is under bipartisan attack in Congress on both the economic and foreign policy fronts.

Mounting Protests

The mounting protests over the Bitburg visit from Jewish leaders--joined now by Catholic and Protestant leaders--threatens to diminish the President’s popularity and erode his reputation for invincible political footwork.

And that, some of his aides warn privately, could impair Reagan’s effectiveness in dealing with Congress, jeopardize his second-term goals and loom as a factor in the 1986 elections when the GOP--with 22 senators up for reelection--will be fighting to retain control of the Senate.

The concern among Republicans is intensified by the widespread feeling that this year’s dramatic shake-up in the White House senior staff has increased the level of conservative ideology in those immediately surrounding the President but reduced the level of political sensitivity.

But, in a long political career, the 74-year old President has stumbled more than once and has shown remarkable resiliency in recovering lost ground. Thus, few in Washington--Democrats or Republicans--are prepared to bet that Reagan will not emerge once again with his political strength intact.

Reagan, whose trip to Europe next week was supposed to be focused primarily on the annual economic summit and only secondarily on commemoration of the 40th anniversary of the Allied victory over Nazi Germany in World War II, has stuck firmly to his plan for the Bitburg ceremony, insisting that he is living up to a commitment to West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl.

The furor over the Bitburg visit shows no sign of abating, however, and it is the kind of symbolic issue that sometimes can fundamentally alter the public’s perception of a leader.

Coast-to-Coast Protests

It has drawn coast-to-coast protests, including a statement signed by 53 U.S. senators urging that it “be erased from the President’s schedule.” And on Tuesday, the Rev. Aurie Brouwer, general secretary of the National Council of Churches, and Eugene Fisher, head of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Secretariat for Catholic-Jewish Relations, both issued statements criticizing the visit.

White House aide Breger, who was not directly involved in the decision to visit Bitburg, is still being swamped with protests and does not expect the controversy to die down.

The Bitburg ceremony was “an all-consuming” topic, Breger said, at a meeting he addressed of 1,500 Jewish leaders of the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee in Alexandria, Va. Rep. Jack Kemp (R-N.Y.) and Sen. Howell Heflin (D-Ala.) also addressed the meeting and called for Reagan to cancel the trip.

Graceful Compromise

Rep. Dick Cheney (R-Wyo.), who served as President Gerald R. Ford’s chief of staff, Tuesday urged that Reagan seek a way out of his dilemma. “My feeling is that the time is ripe for him to make a graceful compromise and not go to the cemetery,” Cheney said. “I’m afraid it will do him grievous damage if he does go.”

Sen. Pete Wilson (R-Calif.) agreed. “He ought to drop the trip to the cemetery. He’s suffering needless antipathy. He is diluting and eroding the enormous good will that was his before and after the election. A lot of people who strongly support almost everything else the President has done are mystified by this and by the bad advice he has gotten on making this visit.”

At the White House, Reagan has been warned that not only his politics but his place in history may be jeopardized by the cemetery visit.

‘Nazi Trip’

Reagan needs to realize, one aide said, that his trip will be “perceived not as an economic summit trip but as a Nazi trip. The Nazi symbolism will overshadow everything else. When the presidential motorcade goes down an autobahn, it will be reported that he is traveling on a road Hitler built in 1936. . . . “

The only hope now, the aide said, “is if Kohl realizes what the Bitburg visit is doing and takes the initiative to cancel it, or if Mrs. Reagan realizes what it’s going to do to his image in history.”

The controversy comes at a particularly bad time for Reagan--just as he has put his prestige on the line in uphill congressional battles for aid to the contra rebels in Nicaragua and for a budget proposal that is under such heavy attack that he scheduled a televised address to the nation tonight to apply public pressure to Congress.

Even before the Bitburg controversy, some Republicans had questioned whether Reagan, who enjoyed extraordinary success in Congress during his first term when he concentrated on only one or two major issues at a time, had overloaded his legislative agenda this year.

Political Capital Spent

One of them, Rep. Robert H. Michel (R-Ill.), House minority leader, also suggested that the President expended so much political capital in winning narrow victories for the production of 21 MX missiles that he will be unable to prevail on other important legislative initiatives.

Reagan’s long-awaited tax-simplification proposal--hailed by the Administration as a keystone of his second term--will not be submitted to Congress until sometime after he returns May 10 from his European trip. But special interests already are lobbying heavily against any provisions that might adversely affect them.

Although clearly concerned about Reagan’s mounting problems and the dilemma that he faces over the Bitburg visit, Laxalt thinks the President will ride out the controversy.

Bitburg Called ‘Disaster’

Laxalt himself said he has not heard much about Bitburg on Capitol Hill. “About the only comments I’ve heard,” he said, “came from several senators who said the Jewish reaction had been so violent it might be counterproductive. At least, that was what they were getting in their mail from back home.”

However, a key Republican congressman, speaking on condition he not be identified, called the Bitburg visit “a disaster” and added: “A lot of guys on the Hill are saying, ‘Why doesn’t the President get off this trip?.’ ”

“I can’t understand why the President is so damn stubborn on this,” he said. “Usually, he’s the epitome of the guy who can reverse field and come up smelling like roses.”