THE NATIONS: Again, De Gaulle

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One troubled day in 1942 Britain's Harold Macmillan, then British representative at General Eisenhower's North African headquarters, wound up a policy discussion with France's Charles de Gaulle with the exasperated statement: "General, you are a most impossible man to deal with." Macmillan was not heard to repeat the remark last week, but the sentiment may well have crossed his mind. For last week, all by himself, Charles de Gaulle seemed to have succeeded in postponing summit talks, perhaps until next spring.

As the week began, Washington was talking clearly of a December summit, to be preceded—perhaps at the end of October—by a pre-summit planning meeting in Paris between Eisenhower, Macmillan, De Gaulle and Adenauer. Then, through "presidential channels" (a category of communication with an even higher security rating than "top secret"), came word from De Gaulle to Ike that he thought summit talks should wait until next spring, and that in the meantime, he had invited Nikita Khrushchev to come visit him in Paris. To his Augusta press conference, Eisenhower sighed: "I was thinking we could do this by the end of the year . . . That still remains my position." In other words, Ike wished that De Gaulle would change his mind, but was not going to twist his arm. Advised one senior U.S. official: "Relax. Neither a Western pre-summit nor an East-West summit is going to be held very soon unless De Gaulle changes his mind."

Price of Admission. Why was De Gaulle holding off? In Britain, eager for a quick summit, the chagrined press cried "Vanity." De Gaulle's invitation to Khrushchev (which Khrushchev promptly accepted) was similarly treated by British editorialists as the general's wish to even the score with Macmillan and Eisenhower. Other critics suggested that De Gaulle wants to postpone the summit until France explodes its own A-bomb—which seems to be having troubles—so that it would not be the only nation at the summit outside the nuclear club.

In his own oracular way, De Gaulle himself gave two other reasons for his desire to postpone a summit. The first is a fundamental disagreement with Britain and the U.S. over what a summit should be. Macmillan, in particular, talks of a series of summits, none of which would be make-or-break. De Gaulle, who believes that familiarity breeds contempt and that a certain modicum of mystery is essential to governing, sees the summit as a single 'grand encounter" that must be "carefully prepared"; as he expressed it in a communiqué last week, there should be an effective reduction of tension before a summit, not at it.

Specifically, De Gaulle fears that an early summit would be largely concerned with Berlin and the German problem, and that on these issues it would be Britain and the U.S. that would feel the public pressure to make concessions, not Russia. He does not believe Russia has paid the price of admission yet: "Favorable signs should develop in the course of the coming months which the debate in the U.N. and the combination of circumstances in Southeast Asia, the Far East and Africa will provide the opportunity to confirm."