The Dam Builders

As the official French government plane taxied to a stop under the glowering skies at Bonn's shabby Wahn Airport, a red carpet was rolled out to the landing stairs. From the plane stepped the towering figure of Charles de Gaulle, who, as the first French chief of state to visit Germany officially since 1870, had come on a historic mission: to cement a lasting bond of friendship and unity between two ancient foes. "The mountain," said one spectator, "has come to Mohammed."

De Gaulle warmly greeted West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, who was beaming like a boy at his own birthday party. To the cheering thousands, De Gaulle proclaimed the importance of his visit in inimitable Gaullist language. Said he: "In the depths of my soul, I feel how significant and gripping are my presence on your soil and my contact with your country."

By car, plane and Rhine river boat. De Gaulle made contact indefatigably for the next five days. Police officials, terrified at the ever present prospect of an S.A.O. attempt to assassinate France's President. blanched at his indifference to security precautions. In Bonn and Cologne, De Gaulle pressed against police lines, shaking hands and murmuring. "Guten Tag, guten Tag." In Hamburg he scorned a limousine that the city fathers had just had bulletproofed for $3,000, insisted on riding in an open car instead. Cops with walkie-talkies endlessly scanned the crowds. Doctors and nurses dogged the President's footsteps with bandages, collapsible stretchers and supplies of his rare blood type (0-Rh negative). Reporters kept telephone lines open to flash word of any assassination attempt, and police dogs sniffed the fields outside the castles and homes where De Gaulle slept.

Though political union with France is a vague abstraction to most West Germans, the crowds responded eagerly to De Gaulle's outstretched hands, his praise for the "great German volk." Though he privately feels that the Common Market is already big enough, in the trade-minded port city of Hamburg De Gaulle disclaimed any intent of excluding other nations from the European community.

L'union, Pourquoi? Speaking without notes, mostly in grammatically flawless, if unmistakably Gaullist German. De Gaulle returned repeatedly to the thematic words: "Deutsch-Franzosische Freund-schaft" (Franco-German friendship). The most explicit and concentrated statement of De Gaulle's plans for Europe was delivered at a state banquet at the Augustusburg Castle in Briihl--ironically, once the residence in exile of Louis XIV's Cardinal Mazarin, an early evangelist of France's longstanding policy of keeping Germany weak and divided. "Every word in the speech is worthy of exegetical study, like a Biblical text," exclaimed one of Adenauer's close advisers.

De Gaulle did not disguise his grand Carolingian design for a Europe dominated by the two nations. France and Germany, he emphasized, must urgently "reinforce their solidarity." Said he: "If we have put aside our quarrels and strife, it is not in order to doze. From this reconciliation we must fashion a common source of power, influence and deeds. L'union, pourquoi?"

First and most obviously, said De Gaulle, the two nations must unite to thwart Soviet "ambitions of dominance." Secondly, he reasoned, "because the alliance of the free world--Europe and America--cannot preserve its self-confidence and solidity unless there exists on the old continent a dam of power and prosperity of the same sort that the U.S. constitutes in the new world. Such a dam can have no other basis than the solidarity of our two countries." Thirdly, peace and prosperity "from the Atlantic to the Urals" depend on a "single, unified Franco-German policy."

Organic Cooperation. In private dam-building talks with Adenauer, De Gaulle keyed his pitch directly to West Germany's bubbling new nationalism. "For years our foreign policy was based on considering ourselves the biggest small nation," glowed one German diplomat. "But De Gaulle sees us in a different light--as a great nation."

De Gaulle played subtly on Adenauer's growing fear that the U.S. will eventually withdraw from Europe. De Gaulle argued powerfully that U.S. disengagement would be more than offset by the new Europe spearheaded by France and Germany, which would be an equal partner with the U.S. in the West, and eventually, he prophesied, a "third force" capable of coming to terms with a mellowed Soviet Union. As a first, institutionalized step toward this third force. De Gaulle called for "organic cooperation" between the French and German armies--a thinly veiled bid for West German financial and technical assistance in France's program to develop an independent nuclear deterrent; it was swiftly downplayed by Bonn, which above all is anxious to avoid alienating the U.S.

De Gaulle's strength is that, almost alone among W7estern statesmen, he has his own firm, lucid ideas about the future of the West--however disturbing these may sometimes be to his allies--and has no hesitation about pushing them. He is deeply imbued with a sense of history (see box). And at 71, he is a man of amazing diligence. Said one admiring German official: "The key to De Gaulle is evident in his speeches in German. He doesn't speak it really well, but he has a perfectly aspirated //. For a Frenchman, that's the toughest letter of all. De Gaulle must have concentrated on it and systematically practiced it until he got it. It's that power of will that's so characteristic. And you can be sure that he will keep pressing his idea of Franco-German friendship the same way."

Natural Ripening. Despite what one Adenauer aide called "the impact of De Gaulle's charme virile on the Old Gentleman," the distance the Chancellor could travel down the road with the French

President had its limits. On any issue apt seriously to impair Germany's relations with its other Western partners, Adenauer would find a huge majority against him in the Bundestag, including not only the Socialist opposition and the Free Democrats, who shore up his coalition government, but also nearly two-thirds of his own Christian Democratic Union. Adenauer's problem, says one diplomat, is thus to let the Franco-German love match ripen naturally, "so that it becomes neither an ersatz for the Common Market, nor a rival for it, nor directed against any partner, including the U.S."

On the other hand, both leaders are well aware that they will not be alive or in office many more years; a sense of urgency underlay even their most florid public exchanges. This awareness of historic work to be done pervaded the entire visit and, more important, was grasped by West Germany's people. Charles de Gaulle has long paid tribute to Franco-German friendship; he even personifies it. Last week he helped to make it a reality that will outlive Charles de Gaulle.

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