Talbot on JFK and de Gaulle

In The Devil’s Chessboard – Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government (Harper/Collins, 2015, p. 412) David Talbot writes:

It was Cuba that created the first fracture between Kennedy and his national security chain of command. But while the Bay of Pigs was still dominating the front pages, the CIA mucked its way into another international crisis that required the president’s urgent attention. The Cuba invasion has all but erased this second crisis from history. But the strange events that occurred in Paris in April 1961 reinforced the disturbing feeling that President Kennedy was not in control of his own government.

Paris was in turmoil. At dawn on Saturday morning, April 22 (1961), a group of retired French generals had seized power in Algiers to block President Charles de Gaulle from settling the long, bloody war for Algerian Independence. Rumors quickly spread that the coup plotters were coming next for de Gaulle himself, and that the skies over Paris would soon be filled with battle-hardened paratroopers and French Foreign Legionnaires from Algeria. Gripped by the dying convulsions of his colonial reign, France braced for a calamitous showdown.

The threat to French democracy was actually even more immediate than feared. On Saturday evening, two units of paratroopers totaling over two thousand men huddled in the Forest of Orleans and the Forest of Rambouillet, not much more than an hour outside Paris. The rebellious paratroopers were poised for the final command to join up with tank units from Rambouillet and converge on the capitol, with the aim of seizing the Elysee Palace and other key government posts. By Sunday panic was sweeping through Paris. All air traffic was halted over the area, the Metro was shut down, and cinemas were dark. Only the cafes remained open, where Parisians crowded anxiously to swap the latest gossip.

News that the coup was being led by the widely admired Maurice Challe, a former air force chief and commander of French forces in Algeria, stunned the government in Paris, from de Gaulle down.

DeGaulle quickly concluded that Challe must be acting with the support of U.S. intelligence, and Elysee officials began spreading this word to the press. Shortly before his resignation from the French military Challe had served as NATO commander in chief, and he had developed close relations with a number of high-ranking U.S. officers stationed in the military alliance’s Fontainebleau headquarters….In panic-gripped Paris, reports of U.S. involvement in the coup filled newspapers across the political spectrum.

Dulles was forced to issue a strong denial of CIA involvement in the putsch…C.I. Sulzberger, the CIA-friendly New York Times columnist, took up the agency’s defense, echoing Dulles’ indignant denial….The New York Times’s Scotty Reston was more aligned with the sentiments of the Kennedy White House. Echoing the charges circulating in the French press, Reston reported that the CIA was indeed ‘involved in an embarrassing liaison with the anti-Gaullist officers.’ Reston communicated the rising fury in JFK’s inner circle over the CIA’s rogue behavior, in the wake of the Bay of Pigs fiasco and the French escapade: “All this has increased the feeling in the White House that the CIA has gone beyond the bounds of an objective intelligence-gathering agency and has become the advocate of men and policies that have embarrassed the Administration.”

Allen Dulles was once again making his own policy, this time in France.

In his war memoirs, de Gaulle accused Dulles of being part of “a scheme’ that was determined to “silence or set aside” the French general.

As he continued to wrestle with fallout from the Bay of Pigs crisis, JFK was suddenly besieged with howls of outrage from a major ally, accusing his own security services of seditious activity. It was a stinging embarrassment for the new American president, who was scheduled to fly to Paris for a state visit the following month. To add to the insult, the coup had been triggered by de Gaulle’s efforts to bring French colonial rule in Algeria to an end – a goal that JFK himself had ardently championed.

JFK took pains to assure Paris that he strongly supported de Gaulle’s presidency, phoning Herve Alphand, the French ambassador in Washington, to directly communicate these assurances. But, according to Alphand, Kennedy’s disavowal of official U.S. involvement in the coup came with a disturbing addendum – the American president could not vouch for his own intelligence agency. Kennedy told Alphand that “the CIA is such a vast and poorly controlled machine that the most unlikely unlikely maneuvers might be true.”

Kennedy’s strong show of support for de Gaulle undoubtedly helped fortify French resolve against the rebellious generals. In the midst of the crisis, the American president issued a public message to de Gaulle, telling him, “In this grave hour for France, I want you to know of my continuing friendship and support as well as that of the American people.”

But it was de Gaulle himself, and the French people, who turned the tide against the coup.

By Sunday, the second day of the coup, a dark foreboding had settled over Paris.

But at eight o’clock that evening, a defiant de Gaulle went on the air as nearly all of France gathered around the TV, and rallied his nation with the most inspiring address of his long public career…The nation had been betrayed “by men whose duty, honor and reason d’etre it was to serve and obey.” Now it was the duty of every French citizen to protect the nation from these military traitors. “In the name of France,” de Gaulle shouted, thumping the table in front of him, “I order that all means – I repeat all means – be employed to block the road everywhere to those men!”

De Gaulle’s final words were a battle cry. “francaises, Francaises! Aidez-moi!” And all over France, millions of people did rush to the aid of their nation. The following day, a general strike was organized to protest the putsch….Even police officers associations expressed “complete solidarity” with the protests….Hundreds of people rushed to the nation’s airfields and prepared to block the runways with their vehicles if Challe’s plotters tried to land. Others gathered outside government ministries in Paris to guard them against attack.

“In many ways, France, and particularly Paris, relieved its great revolutionary past Sunday night and Monday- the past of the revolutionary barricades, of vigilance committees and workers’ councils,” reported the New York Times.

Meanwhile, de Gaulle moved quickly to arrest military officers in France who were involved in the coup.

By Tuesday night, Challe knew that the coup had failed. The next day he surrendered and was flown to Paris.

Challe expected to face a firing squad, but de Gaulle’s military tribunal proved surprisingly merciful, sentencing the fifty-five year-old general to fifteen years in prison.

Following the Algiers putsch, de Gaulle remained an assassination target – particularly during the explosive months before and after he finally recognized Algerian independence in July 1962. The most dramatic attempt on his life was staged the next month by the OAS – an ambush made famous in the Frederick Forsyth novel and movie The Day of the Jackal. As de Gaulle’s black Citroen sped along the Avenue de la Liberation in Paris, with the president and his wife in the rear seat, a dozen OAS snipers opened fire on the vehicle. Two of the president’s motorcycle bodyguards were killed – and the bullet-riddled Citroen skidded sharply. But de Gaulle was fortunate to have a skilled and loyal security team, and his chauffeur was able to pull the car out of its spin and speed to safety, despite all four tires’ being shot out. The president and his wife, who kept their heads down throughout the fusillade, escaped unharmed.

Because of the security measures he took, Charles de Gaulle survived his tumultuous presidency. He died of a heart attack the year after he left office, just short of his eightieth birthday, slumping over quietly in his armchair after watching the evening news.

President Kennedy only met once with de Gaulle, on his state visit to Paris at the end of May 1961, a month after the failed coup. The president and First Lady were feted at a banquet in Elysee Palace, where the old general – dazzled by Jackie – leaned down closely to hear every breathy word she spoke to him, in fluent French. During the three-day visit, the two heads of state discussed many pressing issues, from Laos to Berlin to Cuba. But Kennedy and de Gaulle never broached the touchy subject of the coup, much less the CIA’s involvement in it. As French journalist Vincent Jauvert later observed, “Why wake up old demons who had barely fallen asleep?”

Kennedy knew that he would have to resume wrestling with those demons as soon as he returned home. He would have to decide how deeply to purge his own security agencies, as de Gaulle had already begun to do in France. Kennedy knew there would be steep political costs involved in taking on the CIA and Pentagon….Shaken by the traumatic events in Cuba and France, JFK was ready to remake his government….

Overseas, the speculation about Kennedy’s murder – and the suspicious shooting of his alleged assassin – was even more rampant.

Suspicions of a conspiracy were particularly strong in France, where President de Gaulle himself had been the target of CIA machinations and had survived a barrage of gunfire in his own limousine. After returning from Kennedy's November 24 funeral in Washington, de Gaulle gave a remarkably candid assessment of the assassination to his information minister, Alain Peyrefitte. “What happened to Kennedy is what nearly happened to me,” confided the French president. “His story is the same as mine…It looks like a cowboy story, but it’s only an OAS (Secret Army Organization) story. The security forces were in cahoots with the extremists.”

“Do you think Oswald was a front?” Peyrefitte asked de Gaulle.

“Everything leads me to believe it,” he replied. “They got their hands on this communists who wasn’t one, while still being one. He had a subpar intellect and was an exalted fanatic – just the man they needed, the perfect one to be accused. ..The guy ran away, because he probably became suspicious. They wanted to kill him on the spot before he could be grabbed by the judicial system. Unfortunately, it didn’t happen exactly the way they had probably planned it would…But a trial, you realize, is just terrible. People would have talked. They would have dug up so much! They would have unearthed everything. Then the security forces went looking for [a clean-up man] they totally controlled, and who couldn’t refuse their offer, and that guy sacrificed himself to kill the fake assassin – supposedly in defense of Kennedy’s memory!

“Baloney! Security forces all over the world are the same when they do this kind of dirty work. As soon as they succeed in wiping out the false assassin, they declare that the justice system no longer need be concerned, that no further public action was needed now that the guilty perpetrator was dead. Better to assassinate an innocent man than to let a civil war break out. Better an injustice than disorder.

“America is in danger of upheavals. But you’ll see. All of them together will observe the law of silence. They will close ranks. They'll d’ everything to stifle any scandal. They will throw Noah’s cloak over these shameful deeds. In order to not lose face in front of the whole world. In order to not risk unleashing riots in the United States. In order to preserve the union and to avoid a new civil war. In order to now ask themselves questions. They don’t want to know. They don’t want to find out. They won’t allow themselves to find out.”

A half  century later, this extraordinary commentary by the French leader – a political colossus of the twentieth century – remains one of the most disturbing and insightful perspectives on this traumatic American event. They don’t want to find out. They won’t allow themselves to find out.