THE ALLIES: Waiting for Ike

It would be Ike's first trip to Europe in two years, his first to England in seven years, and everywhere the best linen sheets were being brought out and the silver polished. In Britain the President would go on TV with Harold Macmillan and rest a night as the Queen's guest on the Scottish hills of Balmoral. In Bonn some 150,000 school children provided with paper flags would get the day off to line the streets and cheer Ike's arrival. German officials scurried around for a limousine large enough to squeeze an interpreter as well as a secret policeman in alongside Ike and Chancellor Adenauer, so that on the 45-minute trip from the airport the two statesmen would not have to sit in silence because neither speaks the other's language. Charles de Gaulle planned to meet the presidential jet at Le Bourget and escort Ike up the Champs-Elysees. Meticulously checking all the arrangements himself, De Gaulle scribbled beside one scheduled event, "Not good enough."

France Isolated. By far the most important stop on the President's itinerary, because of the nature of the problems to be resolved, was France. De Gaulle, in seclusion last week at his home in Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises, was planning long hours of talk alone with Eisenhower. Not since De Gaulle came to power 15 months ago, to almost universal cheers inside and outside France, had he found himself so isolated. France had either antagonized or felt itself wronged by all its neighbors and allies. U.S. jets have had to abandon their French NATO bases for new, and tactically less valuable, fields in West Germany because of French harassments, born of France's stubborn insistence on atomic equality and a bigger say in affairs of the Western alliance. Britain, angry about French pretensions as well as resentful of the growing friendship between Germany and France that might reduce British influence on the Continent, was reacting with childish spite in its popular press (see PRESS).

Even De Gaulle's new friends, the Germans, were upset at what they considered France's upstage attitude. An influential group of Christian Democrats in Bonn wired Konrad Adenauer—vacationing in northern Italy—a plea to intervene in Paris. Warned the influential Die Welt: "Let us hope that De Gaulle's policies will never force us to choose between France and the U.S., for in that case we would have to say goodbye to France. We would say so with a bleeding heart. But goodbye it would be."

Africa, too, was complaining about the French. Tunisia last week canceled its customs union with France. The Premier of the new Sudanese Republic threatened to break up France's African community if the French exploded their promised

A-bomb in the Sahara. Largely because of France's own attitude, it found itself surrounded by hostility.