If It Happened to De Gaulle . . .

Should there be a Vice President of France? "What would one do with him?" President Charles de Gaulle once asked loftily when the point was raised. "If he were established in a mansion, he would be called a parasite. If he stayed at home waiting, he would not be prepared for his eventual task."

But last week the vice-presidential question was again being ardently debated in France. Paris newspapers headlined stories that De Gaulle--survivor of two attempts on his life--had been threatened with assassination during his visit to Washington for President Kennedy's funeral. Whatever the real extent of De Gaulle's danger (the FBI indeed reports that threats came in a "deluge" of phone calls to its offices, to the Secret Service, and to police stations from New York to Dallas), Kennedy's murder reopened the problem of the succession in France.

Crossed Neckties. Even before the assassination, the problem was on the minds of 3,000 Gaullist delegates who gathered in Nice during the fatal weekend in a valiant effort to create a young, forward-looking image for De Gaulle's party. The outward trappings were fondly assumed to be `a l'americaine: blue-suited hostesses, party emblems, name tags for delegates, neckties imprinted with the Cross of Lorraine. After the stunning news of Kennedy's death flashed through the meeting hall, Party Secretary Jacques Baumel noted that De Gaulle now was "one of the last great captains of the Western world." Most delegates thereafter failed to concentrate on the endless, self-congratulatory speeches that Le Monde later called an exercise in "autosatisfaction," instead discussed the crime and the need for a French Vice President in the American style.

In the U.S., it was noted, power passed securely and quickly to a close-working associate of Kennedy, to a member of his own party and a man who had himself been an outstanding contender for the presidency. In France, under the constitution of the Fifth Republic, the successor to the President would not necessarily have any of these qualifications.

Double Ballot. Should De Gaulle die, his presidential functions would be "provisionally exercised by the President of the Senate," who currently is affable Gaston Monnerville, 66, a Negro lawyer from French Guiana and an avowed opponent of De Gaulle's regime, which he describes as "enlightened Bonapartism."* Within 35 days of the President's death, according to the constitution, new elections would have to be held to pick a successor.

One Gaullist Deputy, Achille Peretti, is pressing for a different system. Under his plan, as in the U.S., a Vice President would be elected at the same time as the President and "would also derive his authority directly from the nation. There would be two names on the ballot." But in President De Gaulle's opinion, picking a successor through new elections is better, because it would provide a leader chosen in his own right, with a full term of office before him and a firm mandate behind him. At week's end, Charles de Gaulle let it be known that he is firmly opposed to having a vice-presidential shadow in next year's election and a second name on the ballot.

* Reciprocating Monnerville's dislike, De Gaulle has menaced the Senate with some unspecified type of "reform" which many Senators fear might reform them right out of existence. De Gaulle is also reported considering a referendum to switch interim powers from the head of the Senate to the President of the far more representative National Assembly. This would neatly displace Monnerville as provisional chief of the government in favor of Assembly President Jacques Chaban-Delmas, a fervent and able Gaullist.

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