TIME: Almanac 1995

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<text id=93HT1416> <title> Man of Year 1958: Charles De Gaulle </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--Man of the Year </history> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> January 5, 1959 Man of the Year Charles de Gaulle: FRANCE </hdr> <body> 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. </body> </article> </text>