Kennedy's Visit to Paris:

...and USSR...

...France will consider her American ally's advice on Europe and North Africa, and play a constructive role in NATO and the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) only when her demands for "parity" (including nuclear parity) with the U.S...

...In this grandiose context the precise problems of immediate concern to President Kennedy seem likely to strike de Gaulle as rather tiresome details...

...Fundamentally, the General, like most of his compatriots over 45, is a 19th-century nationalist, unimpressed by ideological argument and talk of "defending democracy...

...For safety's sake, however, France must first shed the political and economic burden of Algeria, while bringing to fruition her plans for a French-controlled West European pipeline network to distribute Saharan gas...

...The pathetic Daily Express headline, "Kennedy May Come to London, Too," reflected British sensitivity on this point...

...His diplomats and propaganda media have taken a detached, not unfavorable view of Castro's Cuba...

...As a result, he is now Europe's most courted and—in local Western European affairs—most influential statesman: He enjoys Premier Nikita Khrushchev's esteem and is the first European chief of state to receive a call from President Kennedy...

...ALTHOUGH a nationalist and a former sympathizer of Charles Maurras' Action Française, de Gaulle no longer thinks in terms of La France seule...

...They argue that had he meekly toed the Washington line on current issues, France might well have been tossed a few routine compliments but would have remained as insignificant diplomatically as in the days of the Fourth Republic...

...Like President Gamal Abdel Nasser, who in his heyday saw Egypt as the center of three overlapping spheres of influence—the Near East, Africa and the Moslem world—de Gaulle has a threefold mission for France: in Europe, as leader of a confederal "family" composed primarily of the Common Market countries but ultimately including Spain and neutralized Central European states...

...He has even, at times, given the impression of equating American and Soviet "imperialism," especially in North Africa...

...Had not Kennedy said he would not leave America during his first six months in office...

...But Britain, he believes, has missed the bus—through its rulers' political shortsightedness (in particular, their neglect of Europe and pursuit of influence in the Near East) during the first postwar decade, and their economic incompetence since...

...But he has succeeded—far more coherently than is generally realized outside France—in translating 19th-century nationalist fantasy into 20th-century terms...

...For de Gaulle, nations are individual entities, each with its distinctive character and God-given soul, motivated exclusively by self-interest...

...and Britain's stagnant, unstable economy is nowhere near matching, let alone overtaking, French and German rates of growth...

...France, de Gaulle argues, cannot be expected to support—still less, stake its very existence on—policies it has not helped formulate...

...He appreciates (more clearly than the British Conservative government, perhaps) the expensive futility of Britain's pretensions to independent status as a nuclear power...

...And although he is not a neutralist in the Afro-Asian sense of the term, de Gaulle would guide his West European confederation in a neutralist direction by attempting to build it up as a third world power capable of dealing on more or less equal terms with the U.S...

...Had not British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan been obliged to travel to the United States like an underling...

...and is skillfully exploited by de Gaulle...

...Unless President Kennedy can offer de Gaulle some such package deal, he will take nothing of substance back from Paris...

...and Britain, and for tripartite U.S.-British-French policy planning on a global scale, are met...

...policy, reviving neutralist Third Force hopes in Europe, and acquiring and testing his own A-bomb...

...But Britain can never recapture the goodwill it briefly enjoyed—and squandered—in 1945-48...

...As Jacques Soustelle and the leaders of the Algerian colons learned to their cost, no one is more adept than de Gaulle at convincing those who converse with him that they have won him to their point of view, and he has been known to deploy his ministers and senior officials to the same end with the skill of a great chess master...

...Other members of the bloc would ultimately, he hopes, contribute financially to France's nuclear effort and have access to its results, and the French "deterrent" would then become a West European one—but with France exercising roughly the same control over it as the United States exercises within NATO...

...Germany, divided and inhibited, cannot dispute France's moral and political leadership of Western Europe, however impressive its economic achievements...

...and in the Catholic world (notably Latin America) and well-disposed "enclaves" like Lebanon and the Province of Quebec, as a teacher and cultural leader...

...Official circles were also exultant, though the degree of exultancy diminished the closer one moved to the professional diplomats of the Quai d'Orsay...

...Britain is now belatedly waking up to the importance of its European neighbors...

...He believes that if such a confederation made known in advance its intention of standing aside from a Soviet-American clash over some nonEuropean issue (some future Cuban or Laotian affair, say), it would not be attacked by the Russians—provided it possessed its own nuclear arsenal...

...It took British officialdom four months to wake up to the fact that, for all of de Gaulle's honeyed speeches at Westminster and in Buckingham palace, his lavish London reception last year had not led him to modify his views on Anglo-French relations...

...In de Gaulle's view, France's only serious potential rival is Britain...

...in Africa, as mentor of the French-speaking countries south of the Sahara and, when the Algerian problem is settled, of the Mahgreb...

...Meeting next week offers little prospect for a change in de Gaulle's intransigence Kennedy's Visit to Paris By Ray Alan Paris The announcement that President John F. Kennedy would arrive in Paris on May 31 for a brief state visit brought forth exuberant headlines in the French press...

...And should his ostentatious disdain for American difficulties with minor Asian and Latin American dictators be mentioned, he is likely to reply that it is not a French custom to write blank checks...

...he has stood aloof from the Congolese and Laotian imbroglios...

...This vision of a Europe surviving a Russo-American holocaust and recovering its old importance tempts Frenchmen of all shades of opinion —"Why should Paris be wiped off the map merely because ? disagrees with ? over Cuba...

...he has insulted the Afro-Asian states Washington is eager to impress...

...De Gaulle's advisers say that if Britain's relative decline continues for another two or three years, and Franco-German expansion is maintained, Britain can be admitted to the European community without risk of her assuming a predominant role...

...Those American observers of the European scene who imagine that a few frank words from their President and the sight of Jacqueline Kennedy modeling Paris fashions will suffice to bring France back into the orthodox Atlantic fold are in for disillusionment—though not, in all probability, early disillusionment...

...The General's admirers consider the visit a tribute to his tactical skill...

...In a recent press conference he referred to the basic community of interest of Europe "from the Atlantic to the Urals...

...Instead, the French President has made his weight felt by dissociating himself from U.S...

...He wants grandeur and nuclear prestige for France as the leader of a West European bloc...

...in a statement on Major Yuri Gagarin's space flight, he claimed a share of the honor for "Europe...

...He is not in the market, of course, for advice or "good offices" on North Africa...

...De Gaulle has criticized the policies of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and heaped scorn on the United Nations...

...It might even mediate after the initial Russo-American trial of strength, before the two nuclear giants went to the limit of mutual extermination...

...Newspapers and radio commentators fell over themselves in celebration of President Charles de Gaulle's "victory...

...Ray Alan is a British correspondent who has reported on Europe, Africa and the Middle East for many years...

...Too many Europeans have harsh memories of German hegemony, and French control of Saharan oil and gas can reduce the economic imbalance between France and Germany...