Word: french
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...challenge. Around a mosaic-inlaid table he conferred with France's Charles de Gaulle, West Germany's Konrad Adenauer and Britain's Harold Macmillan in a difficult Western summit meeting. To a ruffled Premier De Gaulle he explained that the U.S. is basically in sympathy with French attempts to end the struggle in Algeria. But in private session he argued adamantly against France's pullback of support from NATO'S integrated defense (see FOREIGN NEWS), agreed to disagree until more staff work could be done on the problem...
...than ever before. To replace the sagging "temporary" prefab it has occupied since 1952, NATO now inhabits a six-story, A-shaped (for "Atlantic") building containing $10 million worth of Danish and Belgian furniture, German and Dutch electronics devices, Italian marble, British kitchen equipment, U.S. airconditioning, and (alas) a French telephone system. But as if to prove Parkinson's law of "plans and plants,"* the first sessions in NATO's new headquarters involved a skittish probing of the basic military and political assumptions on which NATO rests...
Starchy Substance. U.S. irritations first broke out into the open fortnight ago when General Nathan Twining, airman head of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, bluntly told a "secret" session of NATO's military committee that French obduracy over air defense and atomic weapons was heavily responsible for NATO's inadequate state. When Twining's remarks were leaked to the Associated Press, France's touchy officialdom howled with injured pride. The touchiness increased with the U.S. abstention in the U.N. Assembly vote on Algeria, which France did not take as indifferently as the U.S. expected (TIME...
...starchily as the French behaved, Herter and his colleagues were in no mood to give ground on what they thought mattered. When French Defense Minister Pierre Guillaumat protested the publication-not the validity-of Twining's charges, U.S. Defense Secretary Thomas Gates replied: "My government endorses the military substance of the speech made by General Twining ..." And in his major speech to the NATO Council proposing a ten-year program for the alliance, Herter came close to threats. Said he: NATO must "maintain the principle of an integrated defense system . . . The commitment of large U.S. forces to NATO...
Down with Egoism! To French dismay, every other NATO member lined up behind the U.S. in defense of integration. Even though De Gaulle has assiduously courted the West Germans, Defense Minister Franz Josef Strauss pointedly condemned "special egoistic interests within NATO." And many of the French themselves made it plain that they were out of sympathy with De Gaulle's position...