This book examines the key relationship between Willy Brandt (the former Mayor of West Berlin and future West German Chancellor) and the administration of President John F. Kennedy.

Arne Hofmann focuses on the administration's influence on the development of Brandt's 'policy of small steps' and the formation of his later Ostpolitik, the centrepiece of European detente. Brandt's interaction with the Kennedy administration is traced through the Berlin Wall crisis of 1961, together with Kennedy's search for a modus vivendi based on the status quo, the 1962 crisis in German-American...