Sighting on De Gaulle

It was almost as if the cartoonists had been waiting for an excuse to sight in once more on a familiar target. No sooner did Charles de Gaulle announce his decision to recognize Red China than the pen-and-ink brigade moved to the attack. The long, lugubrious face, with its dark, pouched eyes glowering past the promontory of a nose, was riddled with caricature. A buzzing gadfly, a silly rake wooing an Oriental tart, a kook cutting loose a dangerous dragon--De Gaulle was peppered from all sides.

Risky Flirtation. Not all the word-men were nearly so angry. Though Columnist David Lawrence was shocked by what he called the immorality of the act, Columnist Walter Lippmann felt warm gratitude for what he termed an "achievement" that the West would one day approve. Across the country the controversies raged--as much about the man as about his deed. "Both the weakness and the greatness of Charles de Gaulle," observed the New York Times's James Reston, "is that he's so sure that he is right." The Christian Science Monitor called him "a headstrong and shrewd nationalist, deliberately acting against the community of great powers that has enforced the peace since World War II." Said the New York Daily News: "It has often been noticed that when a great man makes a mistake, it is usually a great mistake that he makes."

The National Observer found enough similarities between De Gaulle's France and Mao's China ("both potential nuclear powers . . . neither signatories to the limited atom test ban treaty") to support its contention that these two buddies just had to get together. "A risky flirtation with utterly inhuman revolutionaries," editorialized the Columbia, S.C., State. The Chicago Sun-Times predicted that one bad move would lead to something worse. "To welcome a government, its hands dripping with the blood of its neighbors, into the United Nations is a refutation of that organization's ideals. And to those nations that have put forth the proposal that Red China would 'reform' if admitted, we say--let China reform first."

No Return. Many a paper recalled the familiar line that Communist China must be recognized simply because it is there. "There is no use denying that General De Gaulle has upset United States and Western policies," said the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. "But he has also, if brutally, moved certain situations off dead center and made progress possible." To the Los Angeles Times, it was "fruitless to argue with an accomplished fact." Instead, the Times wondered what nation would next send an ambassador to Peking, and guessed Japan. Cleveland's Plain Dealer saw no point in "forever pretending that Chiang Kai-shek will some day return to the mainland. The United States is trying to perpetuate a past that will not return."

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