Foreign Relations: Sauce and Ceremony

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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 "lives in our hearts," that both the revolutionary marquis and the French President are sons of Auvergne, that France is "our oldest friend and oldest ally in Europe."

The White House even went so far as to call Nixon's conversations with Pompidou "about the best he ever had" with a foreign leader. The meetings did establish an unusually good personal rapport between Nixon and Pompidou. But all the diplomatic sauce could not conceal the slightly bitter flavor of U.S.French relations. In fact, the visit seemed to underscore the differences between the two nations on Viet Nam and the Middle East.

Past Agonies. The conversations, to be sure, covered a variety of less sensitive subjects. The two Presidents were agreed on the desirability of pursuing negotiations with the Soviet Union, the Eastern European states and China. In some areas, Pompidou sought to erase resentments caused by his haughty predecessor, Charles de Gaulle. It was clear that Franco-American relations have become less contentious in the area of finance; Pompidou urged strengthening of the dollar as the keystone of the international monetary system. But the

French President was less than scrutable on the old question of British entry into the Common Market (see WORLD).

In their private conversations, Pompidou praised Nixon's troop withdrawals from Viet Nam, but gently suggested that the pace was too slow. Before Congress, he alluded to his government's belief that the U.S. has failed to meet Hanoi halfway. "At times we have regretted its length," he said of the peace conference, "and wondered whether the paths followed have always been the speediest and surest." Aware of the Administration's reluctance to appear the loser in Viet Nam, he mentioned France's past agonies of pride over Southeast Asia and Algeria. The end of the war in Viet Nam for the U.S., he said, "will be the most precious of victories—a victory won over oneself."