Making the Best of It

This chapter covers the period from the end of the Franco-American summit in June 1961 to the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. During this juncture the policy dispute over Vietnam was neither the biggest stumbling block in the Franco-American relationship nor one that had come out into the open, but it certainly was a festering source of mutual dissatisfaction. The White House, increasingly annoyed with French “obstructionism” and unable to see beyond a perception that de Gaulle harbored wartime grudges with the “Anglo-Saxons” and was reflexively anti-American, expected little from another presidential tete-à-tete and constantly rebuffed French efforts to restore some civility. Voices in the American bureaucracy moderately sympathetic to French aims were either removed or marginalized and the American embassy in Saigon emerged as a particularly hostile voice against French policy in Vietnam. The hardening of American policy toward France grew to the point that Kennedy privately admitted in mid-1962 that he had completely given up on finding any common ground with de Gaulle. Distrustful of French motives, the administration dismissed evidence of growing French influence on both sides of the 17th parallel and signs that de Gaulle actually had the high-level connections necessary to begin negotiating a solution to the war.