Dear Editor
Dear Editor Simon In addition to his being the recent recipient of several awards, John Simon is the proud possessor of a rather singular commodity--his own mind. While many of his colleagues...
...I was interested in their political and military contacts...
...It really started at the Bahama conference where, in his absence, the U.S...
...Chaillet or any other cloistered "student of politics...
...A meaningful detente of quid pro quo might have better prospects now, with the Russians under mounting pressure from China, if the U.S...
...But I don't consider "ruthlessly denigrated" too strong a description of what M. and Mme...
...Portland, Ore...
...Backed against a wall, he holds an attache case bulging with money and fends off the attack of a knife-wielding revolutionary with the words, "No, no...
...Investigators" showed politicians and others photos that were said to be stills from the film and asked them if they thought the lady on the left might be Madame P. . . . After weeks of this kind of thing, the official radio and television announced that M. and Mme...
...Alan is also badly informed: De Gaulle was never supported by the Petainists--statements by their leaders and a simple reading of Petainist literature will suffice to disprove this notion...
...The admission of the Trotskyists to the Socialist party was a consequence of the National Executive Committee's call for an all-inclusive party...
...Such a stubborn commitment to candor must, at times, be difficult for both owner and victims...
...New York City Laszlo T. Kiss Ray Alan replies: I agree that de Gaulle was an outstanding politician...
...But no competent observer of the French scene can deny that thousands of Frenchmen who had been pro-Vichy flocked to support de Gaulle's RPF, and that many unrepentant ex-Vichyites rallied to de Gaulle in May 1958...
...De Gaulle was virtually driven into political isolation when France was denied the right to develop a nuclear force...
...That they lied and flouted every agreement in order to become integrated into the party was later conceded by their own members...
...This group was rather influential, and I dare not mention their names because most of them are now well entrenched in the Establishment...
...I do not want to shatter the illusions of Mr...
...Delon's Yugoslav secretary, who had been found murdered, was said to have filmed a few high-society orgies...
...Since there is no point in contesting his routine charges and the cliches of the 1960s, I would like to offer an analysis of the principle reason for de Gaulle's misinterpreted alienation...
...Army, the British Army and a number of courageous Frenchmen, one of whom was called Charles de Gaulle...
...Finally, every student of politics knows that "a politician who appears modest" is no less a narcissist than the most pretentious one...
...Buffalo, N.Y...
...Pompidou were to be interrogated by the judge inquiring into the Delon affair...
...The final blow to the party came during the period when the Trotskyists were expelled...
...While many of his colleagues willingly prostrate their wits before hordes of Owls-and-Pussycats and Promises-at-Dawn Simon's sense remains relentlessly intact...
...Alain A. Chaillet Department of Political Science State University of New York I take issue with Ray Alan's haughty presentation of de Gaulle's last decade...
...His instinct was sound...
...Thus it was the policy of the Socialist party that caused its "self-inflicted wound" and finally its deterioration...
...Jack Kaye Goodman As Walter Goodman so aptly observed, it sometimes seems that "capitalist oligarchs" can hardly read ("The Thickening Plot," NL, December 14...
...And Pompidou was not "dismissed . . . and ruthlessly denigrated" by de Gaulle...
...he partly succeeded in supplying an alternative to the dangerous bipolar cold-war alignment...
...In May 1958 I was asked by the ex-Gaullist president of a regional organization of wartime maquisards to join a movement he and other democratic leaders were setting up to "defend the republic" against what he called "the revenge of the Vichyites...
...Chaillet's delphic statement that de Gaulle "made Europeans more aware of themselves": De Gaulle undeniably set back the cause of Western European union by stimulating a revival of old-fashioned nationalism and confusing the issue with meaningless slogans like "A Europe of Fatherlands" and "From the Atlantic to the Urals...
...The grounds for expulsion were, of course, the bad faith of the Trotskyists from the day they came into the party...
...The technological realities demanded more than American goodwill...
...I am sorry to disappoint Mr...
...I gave some reasons for this in my article...
...I can agree that he "decolonized French Africa without bloodshed or chaos"--if one overlooks the chaos and suffering he caused in Algeria because he was too scared of the Army, and too spiteful toward the pieds noirs (in other words, insufficiently statesman-like), to give fair warning of his intention...
...For the record, it should also be noted that the Trotskyists were not admitted as a group: They applied individually, and were thoroughly questioned and passed on by the Admission Committee...
...the same men would have denounced to the Gestapo or Vichy's militia any Gaullist they found chalking up these symbols during the German occupation...
...Pompidou's reaction when she told him this was: "Je suis foutu...
...De Gaulle will be remembered (and admired) not for his outlook or his "pose" but for what he achieved: Twice he put France back on its feet...
...It is hardly surprising that Robert Schumann, one of the founders of the European movement, described him as "cet affreux personnage...
...Very few members opposed their acceptance, and neither did Norman Thomas...
...As for M. Pompidou: Shortly after the 1968 election, a glacial de Gaulle told Madame Pompidou at an official lunch: "It appears, Madame, that your husband won the election...
...Trotskyist Bad Faith As a former member of the Executive of the Socialist party, until I resigned at the outbreak of World War II, and as a member of the Admission Committee that screened the Trolskyists, I would be remiss if I did not add a footnote to the fine review by Seymour Martin Lipset of Bernard K. Johnpoll's Pacifist's Progress ("Why Thomas Failed," NL, January 25...
...De Gaulle replaced him as Prime Minister with the more docile Couve de Murville, and before long a serious effort was being made to link Pompidou and his wife to the Delon affair...
...President Kennedy's view of the French President's position was regrettably subjective...
...The author's acknowledgements in One-Dimensional Man, Marcuse's most widely read book, note that "the American Council of Learned Societies, the Louis M. Rabinowitz Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council have extended to me grants which greatly facilitated these studies...
...They met in caucus continuously, and never severed relations with the Fourth International...
...I do not think he was a "great statesman...
...By "Petainists" Mr...
...By then another so-called Clarity Group bad been organized, and infiltrated by some Trotskyists...
...intentions had to be measured in the light of historic Soviet designs...
...Regarding Mr...
...Pompidou endured...
...But then, why shouldn't Wall Street publish revolutionaries' books, when the Establishment's most prestigious foundations subsidize the work of Herbert Marcuse, the most articulate revolutionary of our times...
...Miss Ruth Haefner...
...and Britain displayed utter disregard not only for France's prestige but for its strategic safety as well...
...Obviously, these politically engaged Petainists did not support de Gaulle...
...Kiss, but de Gaulle's "alienation" dates from long before the Bahamas conference...
...He saw clearly that in the age of ICBMS, when a rocket duel between the Americans and the Russians could expose Western Europe to a totalitarian invasion once more, the lack of an autonomous nuclear deterrent would be an intolerable risk for France...
...this interpretation was a journalistic fabrication...
...On the other hand, the editorial page of the Los Angeles Times recently featured a cartoon about a publisher of revolutionary books who had done his homework...
...but before sneering at us horny-handed journalists and accusing one of being badly informed, he should reflect on the Atlantic of difference between "reading Petainist literature" in New York and actually watching French Right-wingers in action in their own hometowns...
...This is one promising avenue to explore, but more thought must be given to developing new techniques to make the people of Middle America see the need for change and to motivate them to join in effective action...
...From my own observations, however, I cannot share Rustin's optimism that a coalition of minority groups with labor is a workable solution...
...When he took pains, he could produce a passable flow of slightly musty "statesmanlike" prose, but the mediocrity of his mind was betrayed time and again by his penchant for glib generalizations...
...Chaillet presumably means the small group of irreconcilables associated with papers like Rivarol...
...Recently, a special effort has been started to reach the conservative churches...
...De Gaulle had only praise for Pompidou and, in 1968, placed him "on reserve in the service of the Republic for more important functions...
...I reported at the time: '"Between May 13 and 16, under cover of darkness, learns of Poujadists and other Right-wing extremists sped by car throughout the southwest of France to daub road junctions and public buildings with the Cross of Lorraine and the "V" sign...
...As a matter of fact, most students of politics recognize that it was a political maneuver designed to enable Pompidou to attain the position he now has...
...he decolonized French Africa without bloodshed or chaos...
...and Britain had worked to maintain the democratic-traditional three-power structure of their alliance...
...France was defeated by the Nazis (with the help of his sagacious concept) and had to endure the cruel years of occupation largely because the General's superiors did not recognize the value of his judgment in time...
...But the statement that "twice he put France back on its feet" is simply propagandist nonsense, worthy of the French TV network...
...In 1962, de Gaulle was determined to provide his country with an up-to-date defense...
...In May 1958 they suddenly became Gaullist propagandists and strongarm men...
...and he made the Europeans more aware of themselves...
...In this context he decided to reject the doctrine of nuclear nonproliferation and proceed with the development of the French force de frappe...
...One should remember that it was de Gaulle, the thinking soldier, who foresaw the role of tanks in modern warfare, and who formulated the Blitzkrieg theory in the early '30s...
...In 1958 the parliamentary crises and threat of subversion from which he "rescued" France were largely Gaullist-inspired...
...But now politicians and reporters who had been sitting back enjoying the show protested that whoever was gunning for Pompidou had gone too far, and friends of Pompidou murmured about a skeleton in Couve's closet...
...According to our latest book you're supposed to murder with an upward thrust...
...Common sense prevailed and the affair dropped out of the news...
...Had space permitted, I might have said more about his pettiness and vindictiveness--significant because they influenced his politics as well as his personal relations--and the blurring of his vision that resulted from his obsession with, and half-baked interpretation of, history...
...Too many union leaders only give lip service to civil rights...
...Back in 1949 he was asserting that England was France's enemy and that the "base and cowardly" Americans were best dealt with by confronting them with a fait accompli...
...Los Angeles J. P. Conneally Rustin Bayard Rustin's article, "Mobilizing a Progressive Majority" (NL, January 25), helps explain the causes of racial violence and presents a strong argument against those who remain skeptical of the possibility of achieving social progress through political action...
...How prophetic is Lenin's refrain, "Capitalists will sell us the rope to hang them...
...Long Island City...
...He failed to recognize the objective validity of de Gaulle's strategic arguments and, at the same time, did not realize that the Western alliance would benefit from France's great-power status...
...In 1944-45 France was "put back on its feet" by the efforts of the U.S...
...It was they who took up the cudgels against the expulsion, and it was they--more than the Trotskyists--who debated and argued for weeks and months until we were all exhausted and the best elements had quietly disappeared from the Socialist party...
...I must inform Alan that it takes more than "a cutting tongue, a pretentious pose and raucous propaganda backing" to make a great statesman and politician...
...I knew personally a group of Right-wing extremists, some of whom (according to an official source) had molested anti-Fascist families in 1940-43...
...New York City Miriam Brumer Defending de Gaulle I was very surprised--and, indeed, disappointed--to see Ray Alan ("Irreverent Thoughts on Celebrated Deaths," NL, December 28) resort to cliches and oversimplified criteria to judge Charles de Gaulle...
...In fact, if they show any signs of militancy, they often risk losing their well-salaried positions...
...It is my contention that we need to work with the "silent majority" wherever possible, both inside and outside organized labor...
...But its persistence is a unique event and provides us with one of the few real "critics...
Vol. 54 • March 1971 • No. 5
