A clash of kings: De Gaulle, Kennedy, and the battle for Western Europe, 1958--1963

This dissertation explains why the Franco-American relationship fell apart between 1958 and 1963, from Charles de Gaulle's return to power to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. These five years mark the height of the Cold War as the two Berlin crises and the Cuban Missile crisis kept the world on edge, with World War III just a single miscalculation away. Despite the tension of these years, de Gaulle believed that, with Western Europe economically recovered from World War II, the time had come for a more equitable distribution of power within the Atlantic Alliance. The United States had dominated the North Atlantic Treaty Organization since its creation in 1949. De Gaulle sought to replace American leadership with a true Atlantic partnership: Western Europe would be allied with but no longer subservient to the United States.; De Gaulle intended for France to lead the European half of the transatlantic partnership. To do so, France required both a nuclear arsenal and European supporters. Although France built a nuclear force on his watch, if found it much more difficult to obtain the support of other European nations. De Gaulle pursued three policies in order to change the dynamics of the Atlantic relationship: a political union among the six members of the European Economic Community; a special Franco-German partnership based on the reconciliation of old enemies; and an Anglo-French partnership that harkened back to de Gaulle's wartime association with Churchill and held the promise of a formidable European nuclear deterrent. Each of these policies foundered, however, due to a combination of pressure exerted by Washington on de Gaulle's prospective European partners and the refusal of those countries to accept responsibility for their own security. In the end, the American government made certain that de Gaulle would not only fail to reduce America's power and influence in the non-Communist part of Europe but also that France would be isolated in the Atlantic alliance. The European Union's ineffectual efforts to influence American policy during the run-up to the war in Iraq in 2003 must be seen as one of the long-term consequences of that outcome.