I saw Churchill for the last time in 1958 when I went to London for the dedication of the memorial to the American dead in World War II at St. Paul’s Cathedral. I hesitated to ask for an appointment with Churchill because I knew he had not been well. But his aide felt that it would be good for him to talk to someone about problems other than his own physical condition. I had learned long before never to ask a sick man how he feels, because he may tell you. But many, and this is especially true of leaders, want to talk about the world rather than about themselves. When I called on John Foster Dulles in his last months when he was dying of cancer at Walter Reed Hospital, I always asked him for his opinions on current foreign policy problems rather than dwelling on how he was feeling. Mrs. Dulles, his nurse, and his secretary all told me that my visits gave him an enormous boost because they lifted him out of his own desperate troubles.
At the arranged time I went to Churchill’s house at Hyde Park Gate. When I was ushered into his room, I was shocked to see how his physical condition had deteriorated. He was in a reclining chair with his eyes half-closed. He looked almost like a zombie. His greeting was barely audible. He weakly held out his hand. He asked his aide for a glass of brandy and, when it arrived, drank it in one swallow. Then he almost miraculously came to life. The light came back into his eyes, his speech was clear, and he became interested in what was going on around him.
I had read in the morning newspapers a report from Africa that Ghana was considering annexing Guinea. I mentioned it to Churchill and asked what he thought about it. “Well, I think Ghana has enough to digest without gobbling up Guinea,” he growled. With surprising forcefulness he went on to remark that Roosevelt had forced Britain and the other imperial powers to give their colonies independence too soon. These countries, he said, took on the responsibilities of government before they were ready to do so and were worse off than before. In this he echoed a point he had made as we were driving to the White House at our first meeting four years earlier.
I asked for his analysis of East-West relations. He still held firmly to the view that only if free men are strong can they preserve peace and expand liberty throughout the world. He emphasized that there could be no détente without deterrence.
After about sixty minutes I could see that he was tiring. I knew that I would not see him again so I tried—somewhat ineptly, I fear—to tell him that millions in America and throughout the world would be forever in his debt. I just could not find the right words to express my feelings.
As I rose to leave, he insisted on escorting me to the door. He had to be helped out of his chair and he could only shuffle along the corridor with an aide supporting him at each side.
When the front door was opened, we were blinded by a glare of television lights. The effect on him was electric. He straightened up, pushed the aides aside, and stood alone. I can see him now: his chin thrust forward, his eyes flashing, his hand raised in the famous V for victory sign. The cameras whirred and the bulbs popped. A moment later the door was closed. Right to the end his star shone most brightly when the cameras were trained on him. Old age could conquer his body but never his spirit.
• • •
What would Churchill’s message to the free world be today?
Though he was a superb leader in war, Churchill was profoundly committed to peace. He prepared for war in order to avoid it. He waged war with only one goal in mind: to build a world in which a just peace could prevail. He was for peace but not at any price.
On the one hand, he would insist that the only way to keep the peace is to maintain strength. He would continue to warn the West about the dangers of Soviet expansionism and, unlike some present European leaders, would consider Soviet thrusts toward the sources of the industrial world’s mineral and oil resources to be as great a threat as tanks rumbling across the central plains of Germany.
He would applaud Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s concern about Soviet adventurism in the developing world. And while he would not follow every American foreign policy initiative, he would denounce with withering rhetoric the tendency in Europe to consider the United States and the Soviet Union as equal threats to peace.
On the other hand, Churchill would give life to the rather tired and trite cliché “Never negotiate out of fear, but never fear to negotiate.” He would urge the free world to negotiate with its adversaries in order to reduce conflict where possible and to make the ultimate conflict of war less probable. He expressed his attitude about negotiating with the Soviets in the House of Commons in May 1953: “It would, I think, be a mistake to assume that nothing can be settled with Soviet Russia unless or until everything is settled.”
Despite his awareness of the dire perils we face, Churchill was at heart optimistic—about himself and about the world in which he lived. I believe that his message to today’s world would also reflect the buoyant hopefulness of the last great foreign policy speech he made in the House of Commons, on November 3, 1953. After expressing his concern about the destructive power of nuclear weapons, he said, “I have sometimes the odd thought that the annihilating character of these agencies may bring an utterly unforeseeable security to mankind. . . . There is no doubt that if the human race are to have their dearest wish and to be free from the dread of mass destruction, they could have, as an alternative . . . the swiftest expansion of material well-being that has ever been within their reach, or ever within their dreams. . . . We, and all nations, stand, at this hour in human history, before the portals of supreme catastrophe and of measureless reward. My faith is that in God’s mercy we shall choose aright.”
• • •
Shakespeare wrote that “some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.” During his long life and career Winston Churchill provided examples of all three. Unlike leaders who seek power for its own sake or who find self-definition in possessing it, Churchill sought power because he honestly felt he could exercise it better than others. He believed that he was the only man who had the ability, the character, and the courage to handle some of the great crises of his time. And he was right.
He had the good judgment to be right on most of the things he fought for, and he had the luck to live long enough to be on the scene when his country finally needed the experience and leadership that only he could provide in 1940.
Of the scores of excellent books on Churchill’s life and times, a passage in the last paragraph of a tiny thirty-nine-page volume by Isaiah Berlin describes him best: “a man larger than life, composed of bigger and simpler elements than ordinary men, a gigantic historical figure during his own lifetime, superhumanly bold, strong, and imaginative, one of the two greatest men of action his nation has produced, an orator of prodigious powers, the savior of his country, a mythical hero who belongs to legend as much as to reality, the largest human being of our time.”
CHARLES
de GAULLE
The Leadership Mystique
ON NOVEMBER 12, 1970, more of the world’s leaders converged on Paris than had ever before done so, even when the city was the center of an empire that spanned the globe. Three days earlier, less than two weeks before his eightieth birthday, Charles André Joseph Marie de Gaulle had suddenly died. Now, sixty-three current or former heads of state and heads of government who had assembled to pay honor to de Gaulle’s memory walked solemnly down the 260-foot main aisle of the Cathedral of Notre-Dame. As the President of the United States, I was among them. But I was also there as a friend.
We came not to bury de Gaulle, but to honor him. Years earlier he had left his own strict instructions for his funeral: no pomp, no panoply, no dignitaries, only an austere, private ceremony in the little churchyard in the village of Colombey-les-Deux-Églises. In accordance with his wish, he was buried in a plain seventy-two-dollar oak coffin, borne to his grave by his fellow villagers—a butcher’s assistant, a cheesemaker, a farmhand—and laid to rest beside the body of his beloved daughter Anne, who had been born retarded and died t
wenty-two years earlier at the age of nineteen. His tombstone, as he wished, read simply, “Charles de Gaulle, 1890-1970.”
The huge memorial service at Notre-Dame was not part of de Gaulle’s plan. It was an accommodation by the government to those throughout France and the world who wanted to pay tribute to de Gaulle.
• • •
Ask someone what he most remembers about Charles de Gaulle, and he may say “tall.” Or “austere,” or “difficult,” or “strong-willed.” Or he may associate de Gaulle with French “grandeur.” Or, if he is older, he may remember de Gaulle as the man who led the Fighting French under the banner of the double-barred Cross of Lorraine during World War II, or perhaps recall the comment attributed to Churchill afterward that “of all the crosses I have had to bear, the heaviest was the Cross of Lorraine.”
When I think of de Gaulle, I think of all these things, but I also remember him as a man who was exceptionally kind, gracious, and thoughtful, no less in my years out of office than when I was in office. He was also one whose counsel I valued immensely, even when I disagreed with him.
What is there about de Gaulle that so impresses him on our consciousness? Why does he so tower over the twentieth century, so much more so than many leaders of nations more powerful than France?
We remember leaders for what they did, but also for what they were: for their contributions, but also for their character. Others made greater contributions than de Gaulle, but few had his strength of character. He was stubborn, willful, supremely self-confident, a man of enormous ego and yet at the same time enormous selflessness: He was demanding not for himself but for France. He lived simply but dreamed grandly. He acted a part, playing a role he himself created in a way that fit only one actor. Even more, he fashioned himself so that he could play it. He created de Gaulle, the public person, to play the role of de Gaulle, personification of France.
Charles de Gaulle could be an enigma—he worked at being an enigma. But he also was a genuine hero, one of the towering figures of the twentieth century and, for France, one of the towering figures of all its centuries. Like a fine French wine, he was complex, powerful, and subtle all at once, and like such a wine, his character has stood the test of time.
• • •
I first met de Gaulle when he made a state visit to Washington in 1960, two years after his return to power. For years I had held many of the usual stereotypical ideas about him. He had long been a favorite object of that special form of brittle, sardonic derision that passes for wisdom in so many Washington circles. De Gaulle’s manner lent itself to verbal caricature, just as his features lent themselves to cartoon caricature. Those who like to puff themselves up by putting others down found an easy target in de Gaulle.
Before I met de Gaulle, I had a clear impression of him as being cold, petty, haughty, insufferably egotistical, and almost impossible to deal with. Churchill’s Cross of Lorraine comment had contributed greatly to that impression—an illustration of the extent to which a single phrase can have a devastating effect on the way a public person is perceived, creating an impression so difficult to erase that it becomes almost indelible. Alice Roosevelt Longworth’s characterization of Thomas E. Dewey as the “bridegroom on the wedding cake” had a similar effect; some even argue that the false impression created by the description cost him the election in 1948. If Dewey’s opponents had described him with such adjectives as small, pompous, somewhat plastic, and artificial, they would not have had nearly the impact they did with that one phrase.
When I visited France as a congressman in 1947, virtually all the French and American officials I met reinforced the negative image I had of de Gaulle. They brushed him off as an arrogant extremist who would never return to power.
My thinking was also influenced by the almost open contempt that our foreign service officers had for de Gaulle. Even Charles Bohlen, who was one of America’s ablest career diplomats and who served as Ambassador to France under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, made little effort to hide his dislike for the French President. William Bullitt, President Roosevelt’s Ambassador to France, told me that Bohlen would often delight his embassy dinner guests by making devastatingly witty remarks about de Gaulle and by mimicking his mannerisms in a brilliant but undiplomatic way. De Gaulle caught wind of Bohlen’s dislike for him and reciprocated. I have often felt that this personal hostility explained to an extent what many assumed was an anti-American prejudice on de Gaulle’s part.
Shortly before my first meeting with de Gaulle in 1960, I took what in effect was a quick cram course on his background. The more I learned about him, the more I found the old stereotypes fading. I learned that, like MacArthur, he had shown exceptional courage in war and that he had been ahead of his time in warning his country of its dangers. I was also impressed by the fact that, like Churchill, de Gaulle had written both extensively and brilliantly before coming into a top position of leadership; and, like Churchill, he had been “in the wilderness”—rejected, out of power—and had used those years to do some of his finest writing.
Like MacArthur, Churchill, and Eisenhower, de Gaulle had been one of those world figures who seemed both larger than life and exceptionally remote to me during World War II. As a young junior Navy officer sitting on a Pacific island and reading sketchy news reports about the obstreperous leader of the Fighting French, I never imagined that sixteen years later I would be greeting him in Washington—much less that a quarter of a century later he and I would sit down together in Paris as the Presidents of France and the United States.
When I first met de Gaulle in 1960, I was struck at once by his appearance. I knew he was tall—at six feet four inches he had been the tallest general in the French army—but his soldier’s posture made his height even more imposing. Only later did I notice that he was slightly stooped.
During his visit, I noted that, for a man of his size, his movements had an extraordinary grace. He never seemed awkward or clumsy, whether gesturing or walking or handling silverware at the dinner table. He had about him a quiet, impressive dignity that was complemented by a certain old-world courtliness in his manners.
The de Gaulle I met in 1960 was very different from the arrogant, abrasive character portrayed by reporters and foreign service personnel. I found him to be a very kind man with a somewhat shy quality that is hard to describe. He was not warm, but neither was he harsh. I would say he was almost gentle. But, as with most leaders, gentleness of manner was one thing; policy was another thing.
Most leaders I have known had a gentle side to their natures, but it would be a mistake to call them gentle people. Those who are in fact gentle are seldom good at wielding power. A leader has to be brutally tough at times in order to do his job. If he frets too much about the toughness of his task, if he lets himself be deterred too much by sentimentality, he will not do what he has to do right, or even do it at all.
As I got to know de Gaulle better over the years, I developed enormous respect for him both as a leader and a man, and the feeling seemed to be mutual. In 1967 my friend Vernon Walters arrived in Paris to take up duties as U.S. Military Attaché. He had known de Gaulle since 1942. After giving a farewell luncheon for Ambassador Bohlen, de Gaulle sent for Walters and asked whether he had seen me recently. Walters replied that he had. De Gaulle declared emphatically that he believed that I would be elected President, adding that he and I had “both had to ‘cross the desert’ ”—a term he used to describe his own years out of power. He then made a remark that Walters later found strangely prophetic: “Mr. Nixon, like me, will have been an exile in his own country.”
• • •
De Gaulle was a creature of the twentieth century, but also of the nineteenth. He pulled France in both directions, forward and back. Throughout his life and career he was imbued by a sense of the continuity of French history and by the presence of the past. His name itself—Charles de Gaulle—reverberated with echoes of Charlemagne and Gaul. Grandeur, glory, greatness—the French word grandeur, wh
en written or spoken by de Gaulle, is sometimes translated as each of these—were, in de Gaulle’s view, essential to a nation and particularly to France.
If de Gaulle can be said to belong to history, that is no accident. De Gaulle willed it that way. He directed his life toward shaping history in the pattern of his own vision. As one commentator wrote, “For de Gaulle politics is not primarily the art of the possible; it is the art of the willed.” To de Gaulle will was the central moving force of nations, and he was supremely confident of his own ability to mold history by the exercise of his own will.
He also felt a need to make France will itself toward greatness. He consistently summoned his people to the “heights”; though these heights were sometimes only dimly seen or ill-defined, the important thing to de Gaulle was that the people feel themselves engaged in the climb. Only this way could the nation be great. He once said, “France is never her true self except when she is engaged in a great enterprise.” He saw himself as the embodiment of France, and his role as one of exalting the spirit of France.
• • •
De Gaulle is fascinating as a person, not only for his historical importance, but also for the exceptional insights he has given us into the requirements and techniques of leadership. Few have analyzed those so cogently as he, or written of them so perceptively. Few have left such a clear chart of their own methods—and yet, few have remained cloaked in such shrouds of mystery, shrouds that he carefully drew about himself even as he explained how he was doing so. He was a master of illusion. And, like a skilled illusionist, he was a magician of sorts. By appearing to do the impossible, he often achieved the improbable.
To a degree rare among great leaders, the key to penetrating the mysteries of de Gaulle can be found in his own writings—not only his exceptionally literate and thoughtful memoirs, but also some of his earlier analytical works.
Leaders Page 6