De Gaulle: The Ruler
Lacouture, Jean
Christianity, Judaism, the Bible—these, Bloom demolishes with ease. A few Republican Presidents, however, and the critic from Yale discovers he hasn't got a prayer. disagreed with De Gaulle is...
...when he resigned out of frustration in 1946, he expected to be called back DE GAULLE: THE RULER, 1945-1970 Jean Lacouture W.W...
...William Tucker is TAS 's New York correspondent and the author, most recently, of The Excluded Americans (Regnery Gateway...
...Here, for example, is his justification of De Gaulle's tinkering with NATO: What is one to think of a country that, in order to survive, hands itself over to another...
...The cost to France was high...
...blockade of the island, De Gaulle waved him aside...
...Lacouture takes pains to demonstrate that De Gaulle was far less anti-American (or anti-British, or pro-Soviet, or anti-Israel, or even pro–Third World) than is generally imagined...
...De Gaulle accomplished two remarkable feats at home...
...Once French politics-as-usual resumed, however, De Gaulle found himself out in the cold...
...Though American readers may find parts difficult to follow, they will be riveted to the pages that describe the failed assassination attempt staged by the OAS, a terrorist organization of French Algerians and dissident army officers...
...Once out of Algeria, the French president set about reordering France's position in the world: distancing himself from the United States, withdrawing from the military component of NATO, blocking British entry into the Common Market, even attempting to divide Washington and Bonn...
...In Lacouture's telling, De Gaulle's peculiar genius consisted in his ability to perceive that a withdrawal, properly orchestrated, would enhance French prestige, influence, and independence (although if such a proposition had been advanced by anyone but himself, De Gaulle probably would have rejected it...
...etting out of Algeria took four G years and several abrupt policy shifts...
...By promising the first (and subsequently accomplishing the second) De Gaulle was able to finesse his way back into office...
...One envies those who Lawrence Mead is a ruthlessly in- telligent social analyst who has become the principal spokesman for "workfare"—the strategy of solving the underclass problem by forcing welfare recipients to work...
...He was a man of vast learning, wit, charm, loyalty, and, above all, courage...
...He does make something of a case that De Gaulle's famous attack on the Jews after Israel's victory in the 1967 war ("an elite people, dominating and sure of itself . . .") was not intended to be an anti-Semitic slur...
...He never did grasp the real danger of Soviet imperialism, any more than did other European leaders, or see the way in which it differed from more traditional forms of great-power politics...
...At this very moment, a Soviet satellite is passing over France eighteen times every twenty-four hours...
...The figures he cites are indeed startling...
...De Gaulle was simply blind to ideology...
...While the government succeeded in suppressing what eventually became a student-worker upheaval, it never fully recovered its equipoise...
...In the end he was a victim of his own success: a new generation that had no memory of World War II or even the hardships and shortages of the immediate postwar period could now indulge in the luxury of an American-type "youth revolution...
...Lacouture feels obligated as a biographer to get us to see the great man's point of view...
...But you know, it's very expensive...
...such things were not even necessary...
...But how can it be avoided when two rival powers, heavily overarmed, give each other the impression that they may reach for their guns at any moment...
...even when forced into retirement, he dedicated five hours a day to composing his memoirs—volumes that set an extraordinary standard for French expository prose...
...hence, the evenements of 1968...
...We can be grateful, nonetheless, that he was not wholly successful...
...What is the point of protecting oneself against invasion, enslavement, annihilation, if when all is said and done, our freedom, our fate, depends on a Senate majority in Washington, on elections in Iowa and North Dakota...
...The chapters on foreign policy will nonetheless prove most interesting, since they address the large issues that were such an irritant to successive American administrations—De Gaulle's relations with the Soviet Union, the British, the Americans, the Israelis, the Third World...
...We felt it, too, not so long ago...
...the cost to Algeria (or rather, to the Algerians) is still being paid...
...And if he confused himself with his country, at least he did more to justify that confusion than any French leader before or since...
...Over the next year and a half, he managed to break with his Communist allies, disarm their partisans, avert civil war, obtain for France a place on the Security Council of the new United Nations, and revive the nation's identity as •an independent actor...
...By the time he retired in 1969 France had experienced a many-fold increase in living standards and general economic confidence...
...He viewed Lyndon Johnson with utter contempt, if for all the wrong reasons...
...like President Nixon, say, or Raymond Aron—were honored with his friendship...
...On Vietnam, for example, Lacouture plausibly maintains that "a real Americanophobe would probably have been delighted to see the United States sink into such a morass" rather than offering counsel which, if followed, would have prevented a major disaster...
...In one regard De Gaulle was far less anti-American than most Frenchmen of his generation: he took the United States seriously, both as a rival and an ally...
...When De Gaullefailed to win a referendum the following year, he saw no alternative but to retire...
...That sounds reasonable enough on the face of it, particularly when one contemplates the kinds of people who make up the Senate majority these days, or tend to win primaries in Iowa or North Dakota...
...I understand your joy," the Soviet dictator remarked...
...Over 76 percent of heads of households held jobs, including 65 percent of female heads of households...
...It did, however, provoke much joy in the Arab and Muslim world, and eventually had very concrete commercial, military, and diplomatic payoffs for France...
...It was a devastating misjudgment: instead, he had to wait out the Fourth Republic for a dozen more years...
...If our view of De Gaulle the statesman does not improve on closer examination, our notions of De Gaulle the man decidedly do...
...The neatest trick of all was to get the Allies to seat France at the table of victors, rather than treat it as it arguably deserved—like collaborationist Austria or Hungary...
...It was Algeria that brought him back—or rather, the inability of the French political class to either remain or leave...
...De Gaulle insisted on receiving Nixon in 1962 when he was at the nadir of his political career, written off by most American pundits and not a few politicians...
...Among other things, it reveals the remarkable physical courage not only of De Gaulle but also of his wife, who was in the car with him...
...He died peacefully at his country home at Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises on November 9, 1970...
...Yet among people below the poverty line, 59 percent of people over age 15 did not work at all...
...His Beyond Entitlement (1986) inspired the Family Support Act of 1988, which imposed major work requirements on welfare recipients...
...Khrushchev grasped De Gaulle's hands and blurted out, "We're both Whites, you and me...
...disagreed with De Gaulle is depicted as perverse or misguided...
...He probably did not waste a single day of his life...
...Alone with the oarsman (and presumably the interpreter...
...For him the only building blocks of international politics were "historic" nations like France, Russia, and China whose interest was dictated by considerations of geography, resources, and cultural spheres of influence, regardless of the political regimes momentarily in power...
...His demands on others were great, but never so great as those he imposed upon himself...
...He reordered French political institutions, with a new constitution that replaced a shaky parliamentary regime with a stable (if thoroughly monarchical) presidency...
...The New Politics of Poverty makes an even more elaborate case...
...In 1989, among Americans of all income levels, 69 percent of the population over 15 years of age worked at some time during the year...
...He apparently liked President Kennedy personally, and had an even higher regard for President Nixon...
...The attempt to mitigate De Gaulle's reputation for hating the United States is not wholly unsuccessful...
...Why he should even want to make the effort is something of a mystery to me...
...On the same visit the two men were out on a lake at the beautiful Rambouillet chateau, which serves as the country retreat for the president of France...
...In 1944 De Gaulle returned to Paris as head of a makeshift Liberation movement that briefly but successfully combined his own Free French with the (largely Communist-controlled) Resistance...
...For him, the French Communist party was just another troublesome group The American Spectator August 1992 59 of politicians, to be dealt with a little more roughly than the others...
...1 nevitably, the Algerian question looms very large in this book...
...in fact, it occupies more than a quarter of it...
...De Gaulle also assumed the mantle of the Great Friend of the Arabs, Africans, and Latin Americans—seeking to befriend countries particularly hostile to the United States...
...At various points there is also a rather interesting discussion of De Gaulle's larger strategic and philosophical worldviews...
...De Gaulle's own experience with the Soviets did nothing to revise his views...
...On the British, he is completely unconvincing...
...This much said, the picture of De Gaulle offered in these pages is of a man who recklessly underestimated the reach of Soviet power, and diligently tried to undermine the Western ramparts against it—all in the service of a largely fantastic notion of France's independent capabilities...
...Certainly in private Khrushchev did not seem like much of an ideologue: During his visit to De Gaulle in 1964, the French exploded their second atomic bomb...
...Until, that is, one reflects upon the fact that France was rescued from Nazi occupation in World War II at the cost of thousands of American dead, many of them from places French people have never heard of...
...Mead points out that, unlike the poor of previous eras, today's poor simply are not working...
...De Gaulle's antique view of world politics could on occasion serve Western interests...
...No doubt he did so disinterestedly and sincerely—by his own lights...
...Norton/640 pages / $29.95 reviewed by MARK FALCOFF 58 The American Spectator August 1992 almost immediately, this time on his own terms...
...While Lacouture is obviously impressed with the coherence of De Gaulle's strategic vision, he keeps reminding his French readers that much of it was fantasy—the real world wasn't like that at all...
...For example, when Gary Powers's U-2 was shot down on the eve of a 1960 summit meeting in Paris, he cooled down the angry Khrushchev with these remarks: Espionage is undoubtedly a deplorable practice...
...indeed, some of the Americans in this book come off better than they deserve...
...He also presided over the recovery of the French economy, and the political defenestration of the French Communist party—two events by no means unrelated...
...And, he reminds us, in the Cuban missile crisis France's support for the United States was so unconditional that when Kennedy's special envoy Dean Acheson offered to produce the aerial photographs that justified the U.S...
Vol. 25 • August 1992 • No. 8
