REPORTER’S NOTEBOOK : Summit of Seven Draws a Cast of Thousands

It’s hardly surprising that this annual economic summit has expanded since the leaders of the world’s richest nations first gathered 17 years ago. But some believe that the whole idea has now gotten badly out of hand.

This year’s Group of Seven summit has drawn no fewer than 10,000 participants; that’s basically seven leaders and 9,993 either helping or observing. And that doesn’t count the 9,000 involved in the massive security operation required to protect the summiteers.

According to chief German government spokesman Dieter Vogel, there are 4,234 journalists covering the meetings (444 of them from the United States), about 2,000 government functionaries supporting the seven leaders and about 660 individuals described as “guests.”

Add to this an estimated 2,800 guides, cooks, waiters, runners, typists and clerks, hundreds of telephone technicians and 130 “hostesses,” and the number comes close to 10,000.

Estimated cost of all this: $20 million. And that’s not counting the lost working hours of those who live and work in Munich and who have been trapped in the summit-generated traffic chaos.

For years, the German police deployed at any international gathering with strong media interest were models of deportment. They walked softly, smiled often and hustled away potential troublemakers more with finesse than with muscle. The reason was simple. They knew that rough tactics would bring swift comparisons to the jackboot era of German history.

On Monday, however, police here abandoned their kid-gloves approach. Surrounding a group of protesters waiting near the spot where German Chancellor Helmut Kohl was greeting his fellow leaders, they waded in with swinging truncheons.

Before it was over, 10 people were said to be slightly injured, 200 were arrested, and those hoping to use the summit to brush up the Bavarian capital’s checkered image were horrified.

“This overreaction by the police has spoiled Munich’s chance of showing itself as a liberal city,” said the dismayed mayor, Christian Ude. “They were tough to the point of being brutal.”

For the White House, domestic politics never takes a holiday--especially in an election year.

Reporters waiting for a briefing from a State Department aide Monday were suddenly treated instead to South Carolina Gov. Carroll A. Campbell Jr., who flew to Munich to sign an agreement with BMW Chairman Eberhard von Kuenheim to build a new factory in his state.

Campbell, holding out the BMW deal as proof that President Bush’s trade policies can bring jobs to the United States, said it “contradicts certain of the statements of others in the campaign.”

Campbell is Bush’s Southern campaign chairman.

Later in the day, Treasury Secretary Nicholas F. Brady astonished some European officials by suggesting that their governments should imitate the Bush Administration’s deficit-reduction policies.

“I don’t want to make a domestic political speech here,” Brady said, and then did.

“I think 1993 and 1994 in the United States are going to be banner years,” he said. “We’ve been fighting and have got our problems behind us. If I were investing, I’d be investing in the United States.”

In their supposedly intimate meetings, the heads of the seven countries (plus the president of the European Commission) stayed in constant touch with hundreds of aides by using no fewer than 16 fax machines.

Every leader at the table sat in front of an aide who had two humming fax machines--one incoming, one outgoing.

The outgoing machine was used for notes of the leaders’ conversations. The incoming machine was for the comments, helpful hints and--presumably--occasional complaints of their absent underlings.

Times staff writers Doyle McManus and James Gerstenzang contributed to this article.