World: Cool Couve's Greatest Test

TALL, patrician, impeccably tailored in grey suits, elegantly aloof, Maurice Couve de Murville is the epitome of the ideal senior civil servant. In his search for an efficient and obedient administrator to carry out his reforms, General de Gaulle instinctively turned to Couve, reflecting his own reordering of France's priorities. For the past ten years, Couve de Murville has carried out De Gaulle's most cherished policies —those of making France seem great in the world again. Now that De Gaulle intends to direct his attention to healing France's internal ills, he has elevated to the premiership the man whose cool acumen and legendary iciness won him among the world's diplomats a wry but not undeserved nickname: "The flawless performer."

Couve is a unusual man in an unusual situation. He has neither a political following nor the flair for creating one. He does not even have any special clout within the Gaullist party. His power resides solely in his relationship with the man whom he serves—a fact that must please De Gaulle. Up to now, Couve has always acknowledged that he knew who was boss. "There are no problems between myself and the general," he once said. "If there were, my role would be to yield to him." But last week Couve hinted that he would stand-up to the general if need be. "Contrary to what many people think," he told a Gaullist deputy, "I like to argue and even convince."

De Gaulle prizes Couve for much more than obedience. Besides Pompidou, Couve was the only minister who each week (usually on Friday afternoon) had a personal talk with De Gaulle. "They weren't really discussions but exchanges in cynicism," recalls an Elysée official. Talking with Couve and observing him in action, De Gaulle became convinced that Couve was, of all his ministers, by far the best interpreter of his policies. Furthermore, Couve's personality—his reticence, precision, haughtiness—met De Gaulle's criteria of the attributes of a man of quality. The story goes that on a visit to Paris as Soviet Premier, Nikita Khrushchev boasted about his Foreign Minister, saying, "I can order Gromyko to sit on a chunk of ice and he stays there until the ice has melted." Replied De Gaulle: "I can order Couve to sit on a chunk of ice, and it won't even begin to melt."

Couve is a member of what the French call the H.S.P., for haute société protestante (Protestant high society), a powerful minority descended from the Huguenots within a predominantly Catholic country. The son of a Reims judge, he has excelled at whatever he undertook. He graduated first in a class of 300 at Paris' famed Ecole Libre des Sciences Politiques, passed with highest marks the examinations to become an inspecteur des finances in the French civil service. By 1940, at 33, he had become the Finance Ministry's director of foreign exchange, but he disliked serving in Marshal Pétain's Vichy government.

In 1943, he decided to join the Free French movement abroad. "Vichy was no longer a serious place," he says.