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By John Elson One by one, the venerable political leaders who had guided Western Europe through its early postwar turmoil gave way during the '60s to a new generation. In 1963 West Germany's crusty Konrad Adenauer (der Alte) resigned at the age of 87 after 14 years as Chancellor. That same year, Harold Macmillan, an old reliable blueblood of Britain's Conservative Party, resigned as Prime Minister at 69, officially because of poor health. (A subsidiary factor: the scandal caused by his War Minister, John Profumo, who had lied to Commons about his affair with a call girl.) Death claimed the widely beloved Pope John XXIII, 81, who had opened the Roman Catholic Church to winds of change by summoning the Second Vatican Council. At decade's end even the seemingly indestructible Charles de Gaulle was dead at 79, 18 months after he had resigned as President of France, having weathered a near revolution only to lose a referendum on regional reform. Until then, De Gaulle had been Western Europe's most formidable-and most unpredictable-political force. At terrible cost and at great personal risk he had extracted France from the morass of the eight-year Algerian civil war in 1962, earning the enmity of colonialist right-wingers. His Europe-focused foreign policy was based on forging a strong alliance with West Germany, the former enemy. De Gaulle was loftily indifferent to former ally Britain, and it was largely at his instigation that 1 of 5  |
