What Hubert Said

Two more different men could hardly be imagined. There was Charles de Gaulle, soldier, statesman, and symbol of a nation's pride, who once wrote that a great leader must "possess something indefinable, mysterious." And there was Hubert Horatio Humphrey, the boy from the drug store in Huron, S. Dak., who likes to say that a politician must "never forget he's just one of the folks." Yet in their meeting last week amid the Louis XV antiques of Paris' Elysee Palace, the French President and the U.S. Vice President got on quite nicely together.

The session was set up on short notice: only three days before, at a State Department reception for Astronauts Jim McDivitt and Ed White, President Johnson had suddenly ordered the space twins to fly to the Paris Air Show--and sent Hubert along with them. When De Gaulle, out touring the French countryside, got the word, he invited Humphrey to drop by. The meeting, with U.S. Ambassador Charles Bohlen and an interpreter present, lasted 80 minutes.

"You Will Never Win." De Gaulle restated his well-known views on Southeast Asia, and Humphrey, in rebuttal, defended the U.S. position. The U.S. is there, Humphrey said, to honor commitments made several years ago by President Eisenhower. Washington seeks only a free and independent South Viet Nam. But De Gaulle should have no doubt about American determination to remain in Viet Nam until a satisfactory settlement is reached. As Humphrey talked, De Gaulle shook his head, said gloomily: "You will never win." Continued American military pressure, De Gaulle observed, will only make Hanoi more stubborn. They agreed on only one point: that North Viet Nam had shown no sign whatever of willingness to negotiate.

Turning to the Dominican Republic, Humphrey urged that France withhold further criticism of actions by the OAS peace-keeping force. De Gaulle, recalling that he was acquainted with deposed Dominican President Juan Bosch, said he assumed that the U.S. had intervened in the first place to prevent Bosch's return to power. It was difficult to understand this, De Gaulle said, in view of the U.S. policy of nonintervention in Latin American affairs.

Humphrey emphatically denied that the U.S. opposed or prevented Bosch's return from exile in Puerto Rico, said Washington still wonders why Bosch did not go home immediately after the revolution was launched in his name. Then Humphrey restated in detail the U.S. case and the sequence of events in the Dominican Republic. De Gaulle said he was glad to hear this explanation.

Wanting to Know. De Gaulle recalled that he had met President Johnson briefly on just two occasions--in Paris when Johnson was Vice President elect, and at John Kennedy's funeral. "I knew Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy," he said, "and now I want to know President Johnson."

This was far from being a formal invitation on De Gaulle's part for a meeting with Johnson. And neither in this nor in anything else were substantive agreements or commitments achieved during the talk with Humphrey. The basic issues in the Franco-American dispute were not even mentioned. But that did not mean Hubert's visit was valueless. For one thing, this was a friendly exchange between leaders of two nations that have recently been distinctly unfriendly. For another, De Gaulle had not talked to a top American official other than Bohlen since last December, and in that period he has come to labor under some false assumptions about U.S. policy. Humphrey at least had an opportunity to set him straight.

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