quality:corruption, linguistic:paraphrasing
Politician

Brandt was elected to the West German Bundestag (the federal parliament) in the 1949 West German federal election as a SPD delegate from West Berlin, serving there until 1957. Concurrently, he was elected as an SPD representative to the Abgeordnetenhaus (the state-level parliament) of West Berlin in the 1950 West Berlin state election, and served there through 1971. In the 1969 West German federal election he was again elected to the Bundestag, but as a delegate from North Rhine-Westphalia, and remained in the Bundestag as a delegate from that state until his death in 1992.

In 1950, Brandt, while a member of the Bundestag and the editor-in-chief of the Berliner Stadtblatt, received a secret payment of about 170,000 Deutsche Mark from the U.S. government (equivalent to €460,386 in 2021).

From October 1957 to 1966, Willy Brandt served as Governing Mayor of West Berlin, during a period of increasing tension in East–West relations that led to the construction of the Berlin Wall. In his first year as mayor of Berlin, he also served as the president of the Bundesrat in Bonn. He was an outspoken critic of Soviet repression of the 1956 Hungarian Uprising and of Nikita Khrushchev 's 1958 proposal that Berlin receive the status of a " free city ". He was supported by the influential publisher Axel Springer.

As mayor of West Berlin, Brandt accomplished much in the way of urban development. New hotels, office-blocks, and flats were constructed, while both Schloss Charlottenburg and the Reichstag building were restored. Sections of the "Stadtring" Bundesautobahn 100 inner city motorway were opened, while a major housing programme was carried out, with roughly 20,000 new dwellings built each year during his time in office.

At the start of 1961, U.S. President John F. Kennedy saw Brandt as a figure destined for high office in West Germany and was hoping he would replace Konrad Adenauer as chancellor following elections later that year. Kennedy made this preference clear by inviting Brandt, the West German opposition leader, to an official meeting at the White House a month before meeting with Adenauer, the country's leader. For the president, Brandt stood for Germany's future and for overcoming traditional Cold War thinking.

The diplomatic snub strained relations between Kennedy and Adenauer further during an especially tense time for Berlin. However, following the building of the Berlin Wall in August 1961, Brandt was disappointed and angry with Kennedy. Speaking in Berlin three days later, Brandt criticized Kennedy, asserting "Berlin expects more than words. It expects political action." He also wrote Kennedy a highly critical public letter in which he warned that the development was liable "to arouse doubts about the ability of the three Powers to react and their determination" and he called the situation "a state of accomplished extortion". Kennedy was furious, but managed to defuse the tension by sending his vice president, Lyndon B. Johnson, to Berlin. In June 1963, Brandt figured prominently in the staging of Kennedy's triumphant visit to West Berlin.

Brandt became the chairman of the SPD in 1964, a post that he retained until 1987, longer than any other party chairman since the founding of the SPD by August Bebel. Brandt was the SPD candidate for the chancellorship in 1961, but he lost to Konrad Adenauer 's conservative Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU). In 1965, Brandt ran again, but lost to the popular Ludwig Erhard. Erhard's government was short-lived, however, and in 1966 a grand coalition between the SPD and CDU was formed, with Brandt serving as foreign minister and as the 5th Vice Chancellor of Germany.