Abstract
Kennedy and his advisers saw General Charles de Gaulle as the most serious obstacle to their “Grand Design,” a set of policies designed to guide Western Europe toward political unity and economic and strategic coordination with the United States. JFK sought to create an “Atlantic partnership” in which the US and its North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies would share the burden of supplying economic aid to the developing world and form a united military front against Soviet expansionism. De Gaulle’s determination to restore French independence and grandeur made him an unwilling partner. American officials believed his intransigence was rooted in an outdated and excessive form of French nationalism. Since France lacked sufficient forces and resources to meet the general’s alleged hegemonic ambition, he appeared a “tragic” figure, or, as Under Secretary of State George W. Ball put it, “the brilliant anachronism who disrupted Europe by undertaking a tour de force beyond the reach of his extraordinary abilities.”1
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Notes
George W. Ball, The Past has Another Pattern (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982), p. 97.
See also George W. Ball, The Discipline of Power (Boston: Little, Brown, 1969), pp. 120–1;
Charles E. Bohlen, Witness to History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973), p. 514;
Walt W. Rostow, The Diffusion of Power (New York: Macmillan, 1972), pp. 80–1;
John Newhouse, De Gaulle and the Anglo-Saxons (New York: Viking, 1970), p. 352.
Frank Costigliola, “The Pursuit of Atlantic Community: Nuclear Arms, Dollars, and Berlin,” in Thomas G. Paterson (ed.), Kennedy’s Quest for Victory: American Foreign Policy, 1961–1963 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 25.
See also his “The Failed Design: Kennedy, de Gaulle, and the Struggle for Europe,” Diplomatic History, 8 (Summer 1984), pp. 227–51;
France and the United States: The Cold Alliance since World War II (New York: Twayne, 1992), pp. 118–36;
and “Kennedy, De Gaulle, and the Challenge of Consultation,” in Robert O. Paxton and Nicholas Wahl (eds), De Gaulle and the United States: A Centennial Reappraisal (Oxford: Berg, 1994), pp. 169–94.
See, for example, David P. Calleo, The Imperious Economy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), pp. 9–24,
Stanley Hoffmann, “Perceptions and Policies: France and the United States,” in Decline or Renewal? France since the 1930s (New York: Viking, 1974), p. 333.
See also his “The Foreign Policy of Charles de Gaulle,” in Gordon A. Craig and Francis L. Lowenheim (eds), The Diplomats, 1939–1979 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 228–54.
Charles de Gaulle, Mémoires de Guerre, vol. 3: Le Salut 1944–1946 (Paris: Plon, 1959), p. 47.
See Pascaline Winand, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and the United States of Europe (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1993), pp. 190–201.
Quoted by David Nunnerley in President Kennedy and Britain (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1972), p. 11. See also oral history of Rusk, pp. 198–9, JFKL.
De Gaulle memorandum for Eisenhower, 17 September 1958, and note for Hervé Alphand, 10 December 1958, in Lettres, Notes et Carnets, Juin 1958–Décembre 1960 (Paris: Plon, 1980), pp. 83–4, 147–8.
Charles de Gaulle, “Renewal, 1958–1962,” vol. 1 of Memoirs of Hope, trans. Terence Kilmartin (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970), p. 202.
John L. Gaddis, Strategies of Containment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 213–18.
Thomas A Schwartz, “Victories and Defeats in the Long Twilight Struggle: The United States and Western Europe in the 1960s,” in Diane B. Kunz (ed.), The Diplomacy of the Crucial Decade (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 117.
Robert Kleiman, Atlantic Crisis: American Diplomacy Confronts a Resurgent Europe (New York: Norton, 1964), pp. 40–1.
Charles G. Cogan, Oldest Allies, Guarded Friends: The United States and France since World War (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1994), pp. 131–3.
Ibid., pp. 188, 198. See also Jean Lacouture, De Gaulle: The Ruler, 1945–1970 (London: HarperCollins, 1992), pp. 349–50.
Kennedy, address at Independence Hall, Philadelphia, 4 July 1962, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: John F. Kennedy (hereafter PPP 1962) (Washington, DC: US GPO, 1963), p. 538.
Charles G. Cogan, Charles de Gaulle: A Brief Biography with Documents (Boston: St Martin’s Press, 1996), pp. 130–1;
Quoted by Mark J. White in The Cuban Missile Crisis (London: Macmillan, 1996), p. 196.
De Gaulle, press conference, 14 January 1963, Major Addresses, Statements, and Press Conferences of General Charles de Gaulle, May 19, 1958–January 31 1964, p. 217.
Nora Beloff, The General Says No (Middlesex: Penguin, 1963), pp. 106–7.
Richard E. Neustadt, Alliance Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970), pp. 40–53;
Harold Macmillan, At the End of the Day, 1961–63 (London: Macmillan, 1973), p. 355.
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Brain, J. (1998). Dealing with de Gaulle. In: White, M.J. (eds) Kennedy: The New Frontier Revisited. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-14056-5_6
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