The European Welcome

Like a miler awaiting the starter's gun, Western Europe got set for Dwight Eisenhower's arrival--that is, the ministers and their swordbearers got set. As usual in August, the holidays had so depleted the supply of natives in Paris and Rome that tourists were reduced to staring at each other.

Curiously, Europe's leaders were not waiting to tell Eisenhower what to say to Khrushchev; none seemed to have any fresh ideas about that. They wanted to talk about their own problems--mostly with one another. Though European leaders seemed to favor Khrushchev's U.S. visit, it had the side effect of demoting their own importance, and led them to jostle with one another. The Eisenhower mission to Europe was thus likely to prove far different--and far more complex--than originally anticipated.

German Fears. The jostling was most apparent in Konrad Adenauer's actions. Originally, he was to meet Ike in London after the President had seen the others, but as he explained to his advisers: "I would either have been compelled to accept what the other three had agreed on in their previous meetings, or, if I disagreed with their plans, I would be saddled with the odium of disturber of the peace." So Eisenhower will see Adenauer first in Bonn next week. In anticipation, the President's personal pilot, Colonel William A. Draper, test-landed Ike's specially fitted Boeing 707 at Wahn Airport and found the approaches and runway (2,450 yds.) long enough.

To judge by his treatment in the mercurial British press, Adenauer was right in his fear of being isolated as a peace disturber just because he warned against the "artificial euphoria" that might result from Khrushchev's visit. The London press attacked him in the same vein as Pravda does. "This man is dangerous," huffed Lord Beaverbrook's Daily Express. "The policy of Dr. Adenauer would lead to war." To Lord Rothermere's Daily Mail, "the self-important old chancellor" was reminiscent of "a bullfrog who puffed himself up until he burst."

British Hints. Britain's suspicious mood reflected economic divisions as well as political differences. Watching the steady growth of economic ties and the nascent sense of "European identity" in the six Common Market nations, Britain increasingly feels itself odd man out in Western Europe, and considers this not the result of British unwillingness to pay the price of European membership but the fault of Adenauer's and De Gaulle's alliance. Prime Minister Macmillan, seeing Ike alone at Chequers, was expected to spend some of his time deploring not Khrushchev's behavior but De Gaulle's, and urging increased U.S. pressure on De Gaulle to "reopen Europe's doors."

French Pride. Touchiest of all for Ike to handle, as he well knew, would be Charles de Gaulle. Paris last week ordered out the red carpet for Ike, "as an occasion for the government and the population to manifest its sympathy for the former Commander in Chief of the Allied armies and present President of the U.S." There will be a procession down the Champs-Elysees, and Ike will be put up in the royal suite of the Quai D'Orsay, where Britain's George VI slept. But behind this "simple gesture of courtesy," reported Le Monde authoritatively, lies a "certain bad humor, almost bitterness," which De Gaulle manifested to his ministers in recent Cabinet meetings.

De Gaulle, said Le Monde, is "particularly sensitive to the 'historical' character of the opening of a direct dialogue between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. In his eyes, it is the end of a great postwar phase and at the same time of a great evolution in the conception of the Atlantic Alliance: one of its members, the most important one [U.S.], has been led into behaving as a lone rider going to speak with the other camp. The partners would be justified in considering that the juridical obligation of solidarity is, if not broken, at least seriously diminished. How can one reproach the other partners if they are looking from now on for means to develop their external policy and to make their voices heard in other formulas in another framework?"

Or, as French Premier Michel Debre put it, in a speech to his Loire Valley constituents at week's end, "To avoid being crushed by agreements between very great powers, a nation like France must be in a position to make itself heard and understood." The idea of France as the leader of a European "third force" still attracts De Gaulle, though other European nations (Italy in particular) made it clear that they were not interested in having France speak for them.

Eisenhower was being briefed on what else to expect from France's proud President. De Gaulle would certainly reassert France's claim to join Britain and the U.S. in a NATO "super-directorate"; he would demand to know why the U.S. refuses to pass on atomic secrets to France when it gives them to Britain, and he would ask for support of French policy in Algeria, still miffed by U.S. abstention on the close vote on Algeria in the last U.N. Assembly. On none of these points was De Gaulle likely to be fully satisfied.

If all of this seemed a long way from what to say to Khrushchev, it also reflected a subtle shift in European attitudes. There was no ganging-up on the U.S., as there had been in the past, as an impetuous or inflexible or incompetent leader. Instead, Western Europeans were enlisting U.S. help in their troubles with one another. De Gaulle alone this time had a bone to pick with the U.S. And to judge by his memoirs and his private remarks, he had always excepted Dwight Eisenhower, in World War II and after, when complaining about Allied neglect and mistreatment.

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