Facing de Gaulle’s Challenge, 1963 to 1965

Abstract

On 14 January 1963, in perhaps his most infamous press conference, General de Gaulle delivered his double vetoes of John F. Kennedy’s Grand Design for an Atlantic Community and Britain’s first application for EEC membership. Linking the Americans and the British in an Anglo-Saxon challenge to Europe, he declined British entry to the EEC on the grounds that it would hasten a ‘colossal Atlantic Community under US direction and leadership’ which would ‘quickly absorb the European Communities’. Establishing political themes that he would pursue throughout the 1960s, de Gaulle made a blatant reference to NATO in declaring that ‘alliances do not have absolute virtues’ and described a Western Europe free of American influence which would play a role in bringing detente with the East.1 It was his purpose to realise these ambitions and in doing so, restore lost grandeur to France. On the same day, Kennedy gave his State of the Union address. Ignoring the General’s rejection of his Grand Design and the MLF, he told the American people of the nuclear agreement he had recently reached with the British prime minister at Nassau and how it would ‘assist the wider task of framing a common nuclear defense for the whole alliance’.2 In private, however, Kennedy was embittered by the French president’s actions and wrote a message of solace and solidarity to Harold Macmillan which was heavy in its anti-de Gaulle Anglo-Americanism: You will know without my saying so that we are with you in feeling and in purpose in this time of de Gaulle’s effort to test the chances for his dream world. Neither of us must forget for a moment that reality is what rules and the central reality is that he is wrong and Europe knows he is wrong. … Moreover I count on you to let me know whenever you think we can strike a blow. And if this is an unmentionable special relationship, so much the better.3