Foreign Relations: Sauce and Ceremony

At the White House dinner honoring French President Georges Pompidou last week, the salmon was blanketed with a light and creamy "Lafayette Sauce." The talks during Pompidou's three-day Washington visit were garnished with globs of the same. The Gallic leader's facile speeches were studded with admiring references to Lincoln, Benjamin Franklin, Dwight Eisenhower. "Your independence and your Constitution have given an unprecedented brilliance and magnetic force to liberty, to the rights of man and to democracy."' he told a joint session of Congress. In return, Richard Nixon glowed that he and his guest "talk the same language," that Lafayette...