Time - Man of the Year/Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso/moy/moyfiles/1958moy.001

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                                                                              ╚January 5, 1959

FRANCE

Man of the Year:Charles de Gaulle



    Appearing and disappearing with bewildering rapidity, the
scenes that flashed across history's screen in 1958 often had the
disjointed quality of a surrealist movie. Some were dramatic
portents of a world to come -- missiles trailing a fiery glow as
they took off for deep space, bearing with them a gadget that,
when asked, sent back the recorded voice of the President of the
U.S., another that reported wondrously complicated readings on
radiation far beyond the atmosphere. Some reflected the temper of
the times -- a shock-haired Texan receiving a Broadway ticker-
tape welcome for winning a piano competition in Moscow, a limber
Australian methodically breaking records for the mile. Still
other scenes were charmingly sentimental -- the heir to an
ancient throne promising himself in marriage to a commoner he
first met on a tennis court, the new, young head of a populous
religious sect resuming his daily classes at Harvard.

    But as the show went on, great stretches of it proved to have
a grim sameness. Time after time the screen was filled with shots
of rampaging mobs with hate in their eyes, or of steel-helmeted
troops fanning out through a tense capital in the fateful hours
before dawn. For 1958 was another year when men from Caracas to
Khartoum lost patience with the established order, a year when
nations abruptly smashed familiar institutions and sent their
onetime idols off to political oblivion -- or violent death.

    Few established leaders or governments emerged from this year
of shattered patterns with enhanced prestige. Nikita Khrushchev,
1957's Man of the Year, had commanded the scientific resources to
produce a Sputnik, but for all his promises and boasts, he could
not solve or begin to solve his country's continuing agricultural
crisis. In Red China, faced with his own agricultural crisis, Mao
Tse-tung launched 1958's most audacious political act, ordering
his 650 million subjects into human anthills called "people's
communes." But at year's end he was compelled to retreat, not
because of popular resentment (which did not bother him), but
because his scheme was not working at all well.

    For the U.S. Government it was a year of holding operations.
The economy recovered its health; the vexed question of racial
integration lay unsolved beneath the surface, but did not erupt
into violence. A nation's youth went hula-hooping its
uncomplicated way, and science, medicine and industry explored
new breakthroughs. But the stones cast at Richard Nixon in Latin
America and the Democratic sweep in the congressional elections
made manifest a widespread discontent with U.S. policy, foreign
and domestic. To the credit of the Eisenhower Administration was
the fact that by firmness at Quemoy and the prompt dispatch of
marines and soldiers to Lebanon, it had prevented dramatic
deterioration of the international position of the U.S. And it
was a U.S. victory of sorts that Gamal Abdel Nasser, who began
1958 by triumphantly merging Egypt and Syria into the United Arab
Republic, found himself at year's end at last aware that his
Communist ally was a concealed enemy.

    The statesmen who did have cause for self-satisfaction in
1958 were nearly all new men -- relative unknowns who had ridden
a wave of discontent into power. Most of them were generals --
Lebanon's Chehab, Iraq's Kassem, Burma's Ne Win, Pakistan's Ayub
Khan, the Sudan's Abboud. And most seemed to have no program
beyond the military man's urge to tidy up the frequently corrupt,
frequently ineffectual parliamentary systems of young nations.

    Few were the world's leaders able to turn to positive ends
the explosive desire for change that stalked the earth in 1958.
One who did was himself among the world's growing group of
soldier-trained leaders. By putting his personal mark on great
events and proving once again the fundamental Christian
proposition that history is shaped by individuals, not by blind
fate or inexorable Marxist laws, France's Charles Andre Joseph
Marie de Gaulle, 68, made himself the Man of the Year.

    Carrots & Cops. Eight months ago Charles de Gaulle, soldier,
scholar and writer, was a recluse, regarded by most of the world
-- when it thought of him at all -- as a man whose role in
history had ended a dozen years earlier. Today he is Premier and
President-elect of France's Fifth Republic and exercises more
direct power over his country's affairs than any other
democratically chosen leader in the Western world. "His personal
prestige," says a British expert on France, "is higher than that
of any Frenchman since Napoleon."

    When De Gaulle emerged from the somnolent village of
Colombey-les-deux-Eglises last May, France was sliding hopelessly
into civil war. "The carrots are cooked, the carrots are cooked,"
blared Radio Algiers, repeating with monotonous insistence the
code phrase which signified that the rebellious generals of
Algeria were ready to land their paratroops in Metropolitan
France. In Paris white-faced ministers of the Fourth Republic
nervously deployed a small army of steel-helmeted cops, not sure
of their loyalty, and Interior Minister Jules Moch ordered coils
of barbed wire laid out on 15 of the 18 airfields surrounding
Paris. Escorting a visitor out of his office, ex-Premier Guy
Mollet, onetime Socialist Resistance leader, soberly remarked:
"We may never see each other again. I am going to die on the
barricades."

    Today, those three ominous weeks in May seem a world away; if
they did not justify the worst of fears, it was because all
Frenchmen knew that they had a man to fall back on. Charles de
Gaulle, with the spontaneous support of his countrymen, has
restored the supremacy of internal law and given France a new
constitution that for the first time in 88 years endows the
executive branch with enough authority to pursue coherent
policies. He has all but destroyed the Communist Party as an
active factor in French government, has laid the groundwork for a
fruitful new relationship between France and her onetime African
colonies, and has immensely strengthened France's moral and
psychological position in revolt-torn Algeria. Above all, he has
given Frenchmen back their pride, swept away the miasma of self-
contempt that has hung over France since its ignominious
capitulation to Hitler in 1940.

    Too Poor to Bow. In achieving all of this, De Gaulle has once
again confounded his critics. Few statesmen of his time have been
so consistently misunderstood. Joseph Stalin, in a moment of
exceptional obtuseness, dismissed him as "not complicated."
Franklin Roosevelt shared the view of him held by British
Novelist H.G. Wells -- "an utterly sincere megalomaniac." Others,
misjudging him in two directions, have called him everything from
a dictator-at-heart to an inept political thimblerigger.

    The world at large first formed its impression of Charles de
Gaulle in World War II, and it was not an endearing one. As
leader of Free France, he was proud, touchy, intransigent.
Winston Churchill felt that De Gaulle owed his continued
existence to the British, and should be grateful and compliant.
All parties concerned have since composed more graceful tribute
to one another, but in those tense days feelings ran high. To
Franklin Roosevelt, De Gaulle was an upstart playing Joan of Arc.
"Yes," Churchill is reported to have rejoined, "but my bloody
bishops won't let me burn him."

    Recalling those bitter days of uphill struggle, De Gaulle
himself has written: "I was starting from scratch. In France, no
following and no reputation. Abroad, neither credit nor standing.
But this very destitution showed me my line of conduct. It was by
adopting without compromise the cause of the national recovery
that I could acquire authority. At this moment, the worst in her
history, it was for me to assume the burden of France." This
attitude "was to dictate my bearing and to impose upon my
personality an attitude I could never again change.

    He refused himself the easier waiting role of a mere refugee
movement in London; he refused to enlist French soldiers into
British units to "fight a war no longer their own"; he "encased
myself in ice" against those who opposed him. "I am too poor to
be able to bow," he once told Churchill. At first considered an
absurd figure, in the end he won grudging respect -- and, more
important, won his point.

    The widely held suspicion of De Gaulle, more prevalent
outside France than in, stems not from anything De Gaulle has
done but from what he is. In an age that makes a cult of
ordinariness, he is a democrat but not an egalitarian. In a world
in which power suggests danger, he openly regards the wise
exercise of power as the supreme function of man. Where most
mid-20th century statesmen feel obliged to cloak their
extraordinary qualities in a mantle of folksiness, he unabashedly
regards himself as a historic figure and comports himself as a
man of greatness.

    The Old Soldier. At the somber, grey-walled Hotel Matignon,
official residence of France's Premiers, the Republican Guards
now wear dress uniform (white gloves, red epaulets) every day,
and treat visitors with a new formality. Senior government
officials no longer wander in whenever they feel like an informal
chat, nor do they ring up the Premier on a direct line. De
Gaulle, who regards the telephone as an intolerable impediment to
concentration, has had the only one in his office disconnected.

    Like the old soldier he is, De Gaulle has imposed a brisk
routine on himself as well as on his subordinates. Arising
punctually at 7:30, he breakfasts on coffee then plunges into a
detailed summary of the French and foreign press. At 9 he enters
his office (which is decorated with busts of Caesar and Nero) for
a conference with his personal staff, headed by 47-year-old
Georges Pompidou, onetime executive of the Rothschild bank. The
day planned, De Gaulle spends from two to three hours receiving
visitors. Contrary to their original expectations, De Gaulle
treats his own Cabinet ministers with old-fashioned courtesy,
listens carefully and takes notes, but makes his own final
decisions.

    After lunch (1 to 2:30) De Gaulle returns to his office,
does paperwork steadily until 8, then adjourns for dinner and a
quiet evening with his wife. Determined to avoid the nervous
strain that wore 25 lbs. off one of his predecessors, he makes it
a rule that he is not to be disturbed in the evening except for a
grave emergency. So far there has been no emergency his staff
considered that grave.

    "Why Doesn't He Laugh?" For all his military briskness, De
Gaulle in private life is a fond family man. Particularly devoted
to his daughter Anne (who was born sickly and died in 1948), he
and Madame de Gaulle have founded in her memory an institution
for retarded children. At the 14-room house in Colombey, where he
still spends his weekends, he loves to play the patriarch of the
clan, gathering about him his naval officer son Philippe, his
daughter Elizabeth (married to an army officer) his three
grandchildren, and as many as possible of his 17 nieces and
nephews and innumerable grandnieces and grandnephews. To the
children, he is benign, loving "Uncle Charles."

    When he chooses to exercise it, De Gaulle is capable of an
unexpected humor. In his teens he was famed for his rendition of
the "nose" speech from Cyrano de Bergerac -- an act that involved
masterful use of his own huge nose. And at his infrequent press
conferences, he has employed his long, basset-hound countenance
to immensely comic effect.

    His wit is apt to be savagely ironic. When one of his aides,
exasperated by a piece of correspondence, impatiently exclaimed
"Death to all fools," De Gaulle soberly murmured: "Ah! What a
vast program."

    The once-lean soldier is now a man with considerable
frontage; thick glasses give him the effect of walking unseeing.
The effect has increased his air of austere remoteness. Outside
his family, there is no man who can honestly call himself De
Gaulle's friend, and anyone who strives to achieve uninvited
intimacy with him is brusquely repulsed. On a flight to Algiers a
few weeks ago, mercurial Leon Delbecque, one of the organizers of
the insurrection that led to De Gaulle's return to power, plumped
himself down in the seat opposite the general. Hastily, De Gaulle
summoned his trusted military aide Colonel Gaston de Bonneval for
a whispered conversation. When De Bonneval defensively -- and
audibly -- remarked, "But, mon general, I didn't ask him to sit
there," Delbecque ignominiously retreated.

    Provoked beyond endurance by this solemn hauteur, a Frenchman
recently burst out: "He's pleased with the way things have gone,
isn't he? Then why doesn't he ever laugh?" To this question, De
Gaulle himself supplied an answer years ago: "Prestige cannot
exist without mystery, for people revere little what they know
too well. All cults have their tabernacles, and no great man is
great in the eyes of his servants."

    Some Signal Service. De Gaulle began early to dream of
greatness. From his father, "a thoughtful, cultivated,
traditional man," a wounded veteran of the Franco-Prussian War
who taught philosophy at a Jesuit school in Paris. De Gaulle
acquired his absorbing passion for French history. And from
childhood on, God's omnipotence has been intertwined in De
Gaulle's mind with the greatness of France. As an adolescent, he
conceived of France as "the princess in the fairy stories or the
Madonna in the frescoes," was convinced that "the interest of
life consisted in one day rendering her some signal service, and
that I would have the occasion to do so."

    Inheriting a scholarly tradition on both sides of his family,
blessed with a retentive memory and an analytical intelligence,
he sharpened his mind on the classics, ancient and modern -- an
exercise that makes him one of the few statesmen alive who can
bolster an argument with references to Heraclitus and Henri
Bergson. His copy-book at Saint-Cyr bore Victor Hugo's maxim:
"Concision in style, precision in thought, decision in life."

    Along with first-class intellectual training, De Gaulle
acquired from his mother, a descendant of Scottish and Irish
refugees who came to France with the fleeing Stuarts, a highly
individualistic and severe religious faith. His devout
Catholicism is of the kind that has a hatred of waste,
ostentation or levity. It is also intensely private. Recalling in
his memoirs the occasion during World War II when F.D.R. sent
Cardinal Spellman to try to convince the Free French of the
rightness of a particular aspect of U.S. policy, De Gaulle
writes: "This eminently pious prelate approached the problems of
this world with an evident care to serve only the cause of God.
But the greatest devotion cannot prevent business from being
business."

    Friend of Petain. Entering France's famed military academy of
Saint-Cyr at 18, Cadet de Gaulle was unfashionably churchgoing,
personally reticent, suitably erudite, but already militarily
unorthodox. His hulking, outsized (6 ft. 4 in.) body earned him
the nickname "the big asparagus." He graduated among the top 15
in his class, had his choice of regiments. His pick; the 33rd
Infantry, commanded by Colonel Henri Philippe Petain.

    For the next 20 years De Gaulle's career was closely tied to
the man who was one day to become his archenemy, the Petain who
"showed me the meaning of the art and gift of command." Captured
by the Germans in 1916 in a hand-to-hand battle, during which he
suffered his third wound of World War I, De Gaulle was cited for
gallantry on Petain's recommendation. When he finally returned to
France, after 32 months in prison camps and five vain attempts at
escape, De Gaulle married Yvonne Vendroux, demure daughter of a
biscuit manufacturer from Calais -- and named his first child
after Petain. In 1927 Petain, by then a marshal of France,
appointed De Gaulle his aide-de-camp.

    The break came in 1934, when De Gaulle published The Army of
the Future, a prescient and skillfully written plea for a small
professional army built around armored divisions capable of
exploiting concentrated breakthroughs. Though it sold only 700
copies in France, the book went like hotcakes (7,000 copies) in
Germany and was read aloud to Hitler on the advice of his
generals. But to Petain, obsessed with the superiority of
defensive strategy and massed infantry, the De Gaulle doctrine
was heresy. French generals, wrote De Gaulle, "were growing old
at their posts, wedded to errors that once constituted their
glory." Backed only by a handful of admirers, including future
Premier Paul Reynaud, lanky Colonel de Gaulle was regarded in
Parisian society as a mechanized bore.

    In another early book, The Sword's Edge, which was as
fecklessly ignored as The Army of the Future, De Gaulle discussed
the problems of military command in such a way as to etch a self-
portrait. Items:

    -- "Evangical perfection does not lead to empire. The man of
action cannot be conceived of without a strong dose of egoism,
pride, toughness and cunning."

    -- "Nothing enhances authority better than silence . . . As
all that comes from the leader is highly contagious, he creates
calm and attention provided he remains silent."

    -- "It is necessary that the aim in which the leader absorbs
himself should carry the mark of greatness."

    Not Without Grandeur. World War II gave De Gaulle his first
real chance to test his military theories in action. His doctrine
of mechanized warfare was dramatically vindicated -- both by the
Germans, who used it to conquer France, and by De Gaulle himself,
who, near Abbeville, with a pickup armored division, dealt the
Nazis their only major setback during the invasion.

  De Gaulle arrived in London in 1940, alone and an unknown, in a
plan provided by the British. In absentia he was tried and
condemned to death for treason by the Vichy government of Marshal
Petain. He let out his famous rallying cry -- "France has lost a
battle, but France has not lost the war" -- and thereafter, he
and his Cross of Lorraine slowly became the symbols of France.
(Symbol was in fact his Resistance code name.)

    He returned to Paris in 1944, the idol of France and
commander of 500,000 armed men. Only his own character stood
between De Gaulle and a dictator's power. But as France's first
postwar President, he had a precise conception of his mission: to
restore republican order and "let the people pronounce." He
refused to take the drastic action that might have eased France's
grievous economic problems. "You won't get me talking economics
and finance for a whole afternoon again," he told his Finance
Minister irritably one day. Yet at the same time he despised the
old "regime of parties," refused to deal with working
politicians. "A man equally incapable of monopolizing power and
of sharing it," complained one of his ministers.

    In the end, the pols prevailed. Under their influence, the
French electorate rejected a constitution that would have given
France the strong executive De Gaulle believed it needed. In an
ill-fated attempt to create national unity, De Gaulle gave the
Communists five Cabinet posts, only to have them revile him
because he refused them the crucial Ministries of War, Foreign
Affairs and Interior. Finally, one cold day in January 1946, the
general called in his Cabinet and announced: "You espoused the
quarrels of your various parties. It is not this way that I
understand things . . . I have therefore resolved to abandon
office . . . My resolution is not subject to discussion." As De
Gaulle walked away, Communist Boss Maurice Thorez broke the
stupefied silence. "This departure does not lack grandeur," he
said.

    Two-Pistol Technique. The twelve years of retirement that
followed were in some ways the most educational in De Gaulle's
life. After abandoning active efforts at a political comeback in
1953, he continued to drive into Paris from Colombey once a week
to hold court in his Spartan Left Bank office on the Rue de
Solferino. And because he remained for many Frenchmen a kind of
father figure, men of every political current called to confide
in him. Without ever soliciting information, De Gaulle became
perhaps the best-informed man in France on the inner workings and
gaping inadequacies of the Fourth Republic.

    Even more educational was the composition of his memoirs.
Painstakingly set down in elongated script, the memoirs were
written in a classic prose Frenchmen had not seen in a long time-
precise yet lyrical, stamped with honor, revealing the essential
selflessness of a man dedicated to his nation's grandeur. On the
strength of this literary achievement France's intellectuals --
who do so much to set their country's political tone -- for the
first time gave De Gaulle their whole hearted admiration. (Though
Volume I sold a mere 6,900 copies in the U.S.) And in the act of
reducing his life to book form, the general reviewed his past
mistakes, sketched out alternative plans of action that might
have worked better. Says one of De Gaulle's associates: "Writing
the memoirs made him a political tactician."

    Result was that when the frustrated soldiers and settlers of
Algiers broke into revolt last May, De Gaulle was, in his own
words and in a sense that had never been true before, "ready to
assume the powers of the Republic." He knew precisely what assets
he had -- his own immense prestige and the fact that the only
alternative was civil war. His technique was very much like that
of the bandit hero of a play he had written at 15. In De Gaulle's
youthful play the bandit, as he strips a traveler of his
belongings, periodically abandons flowing Alexandrine verse to
declare simply: "Besides, I have two pistols."

    Faced with the two-pistol technique the panicky leaders of
the Fourth Republic rapidly wilted. "Each day," complained
ex-Premier Georges Bidault, "our position toward De Gaulle
changes. Yesterday we were standing; today we are on our knees;
tomorrow we will be on our bellies."

    The Finest Day. Still haunted by the dubious legality of his
World War II Free French movement, De Gaulle was determined that
this time nothing should stain the legitimacy of his power. (If
the rebellious generals seized Paris by force, he told a
subordinate, "they will not find De Gaulle in their baggage.")
But to achieve power legitimately, he needed parliamentary
approval, above all, that of the Socialist Party. accordingly,
when Socialist Guy Mollet flew down to Colombey to see whether
he could support De Gaulle with a clear conscience, the general
smothered all his longtime contempt for party politics, turned on
such charm that Mollet departed with the declaration: "Today has
been the finest day of my life."

    And when time came for the crucial vote in which the Assembly
was to send itself on vacation and grant him untrammeled power
for six months, De Gaulle personally shepherded the measure
through, even won admiring guffaws from members of a system he
despised by an ironic reference to "the pleasure and honor that I
find in being with you tonight."

    Silence & Her Sister. Once invested as Premier, De Gaulle had
three immediate objectives: to bring the army back under control
of the central government, to win approval of a constitution that
would give France a strong executive, to come to terms with the
French colonies' desire for independence without sacrificing a
French relationship with them. To achieve these goals, he
proceeded to employ his resources (which now included
unchallenged legitimacy) according to the rules he had laid down
in The Sword's Edge -- "economy of force, the necessity of
advancing in strength (and, hence, by stages or bounds), surprise
for the enemy, security for oneself."

    In the year's most impressive display of political mastery,
De Gaulle made each of his objectives support the others. By
flying Rebel Organizer Jacques Soustelle out of Algiers and
making him his Minister of Information, De Gaulle yanked the
insurgents' sharpest tooth, yet at the same time gave the
embattled settlers enough of a payoff to keep them submissive if
not content. By tying the vote on autonomy for France's Black
African territories to the vote on his proposed constitution, he
obliged right-wingers to swallow his liberal colonial policy, at
the same time picked up 9,000,000 African votes to swell his
majority in the constitutional referendum. By showing himself
willing to offer Algeria's Moslem rebels something besides
naked force, and by taking the gamble of extending the
constitutional referendum to Algeria, he reconciled many
left-wingers to his tighter, more disciplined constitution, added
another 3,500,000 Algerian votes to his majority, and threw the
rebel National Liberation Front onto the psychological defensive.

    All along, too, De Gaulle made highly effective use of
surprise, silence, and silence's sister, the oracular utterance.
"I have understood you," he told a wildly cheering crowd during
his first trip to Algiers after becoming Premier. Only four
months later, when he abruptly ordered all French army officers
to resign from the insurrectionary Committees of Public Safety,
did the right-wing Europeans of Algiers realize that what he had
meant was that he understood them and disapproved. Last week,
with almost equal lack of forewarning, De Gaulle suddenly began
churning out a series of decrees that he had been quietly
preparing ever since his return to power last June. Among them:

    -- A 10-25% hike in France's ridiculously low rent ceilings,
which have long been pegged to pre-inflation levels.

    -- A general overhaul of the judicial system designed to
eliminate useless officials and to raise the pay and professional
standards of France's judges.

    -- A sweeping monetary reform.

    -- A tough 1959 budget that will halve the deficit by hiking
taxes and cutting "social expenditures" (price supports,
veterans' pensions, etc.). His drastic action should bring some
order to France's tangled finances, at the same time provide
funds for massive public investment in both France and Algeria.
He promised nothing but a time of trials, but added that "without
the effort to restore order," France would be a nation
"perpetually oscillating between drama and mediocrity." De
Gaulle, who dislikes economics so much, had this time shown
himself willing to take it seriously.

    A Time for Miracles. Despite this initial record of
accomplishment, de Gaulle has a long way to go. In fact, his very
conditions for returning to power-that he be summoned on his own
unquestioned terms-made it necessary for circumstances to be
almost beyond retrieving before he would take over. The slope
that lies before him is steep. Wonders Socialist Guy Mollet:
"Frenchmen expect miracles of De Gaulle. But can he work
miracles?"

    The array of troubles before De Gaulle is indeed sobering.
The country is basically prosperous, but its economy is
restrictive. Politically, the new Assembly, calling itself
Gaullist, is considerably more rightist in outlook than the
general himself. Above all, the four-year-old Algerian Moslem
revolt continues to drain France of $2,400,000 a day, and
prospects for negotiated end to the fighting, once considered
high, were badly dashed last October, when the rebels angrily
considered de Gaulle's soldier-to-soldier, "flag-of-truce" offer
a humiliating proposal.

    But such problems, the kind that reduced every leader of the
Fourth Republic to fatalistic acceptance of eventual defeat,
provide a kind of elation to a man of De Gaulle's temperament.
"France," he wrote in his memoirs, "is not really herself unless
in the front rank. Only vast enterprises are capable of
counterbalancing the ferments of dispersal which are inherent in
her people." As for himself, De Gaulle has never abandoned the
position he took a quarter of a century ago: "Faced with crisis,
the man of character falls back on himself. He imposes his own
stamp on action, takes responsibility for it, makes it his own .
. . Difficulty attracts the man of character because it is in
embracing it that he realizes himself."

    These were bold, proud words. But underlying them is the
deepest of all De Gaulle's convictions: "Glory gives herself only
to those who have always dreamed of her." In 1958, obedient to
his maxim, glory gave herself to Charles de Gaulle.