Cool Couve's Greatest Test

TALL, patrician, impeccably tailored in grey suits, elegantly aloof, Maurice Couve de Murville is the epitome of the ideal senior civil servant. In his search for an efficient and obedient administrator to carry out his reforms, General de Gaulle instinctively turned to Couve, reflecting his own reordering of France's priorities. For the past ten years, Couve de Murville has carried out De Gaulle's most cherished policies --those of making France seem great in the world again. Now that De Gaulle intends to direct his attention to healing France's internal ills, he has elevated to the premiership the man whose cool acumen and legendary iciness won him among the world's diplomats a wry but not undeserved nickname: "The flawless performer."

Couve is a unusual man in an unusual situation. He has neither a political following nor the flair for creating one. He does not even have any special clout within the Gaullist party. His power resides solely in his relationship with the man whom he serves--a fact that must please De Gaulle. Up to now, Couve has always acknowledged that he knew who was boss. "There are no problems between myself and the general," he once said. "If there were, my role would be to yield to him." But last week Couve hinted that he would stand-up to the general if need be. "Contrary to what many people think," he told a Gaullist deputy, "I like to argue and even convince."

De Gaulle prizes Couve for much more than obedience. Besides Pompidou, Couve was the only minister who each week (usually on Friday afternoon) had a personal talk with De Gaulle. "They weren't really discussions but exchanges in cynicism," recalls an Elysee official. Talking with Couve and observing him in action, De Gaulle became convinced that Couve was, of all his ministers, by far the best interpreter of his policies. Furthermore, Couve's personality--his reticence, precision, haughtiness--met De Gaulle's criteria of the attributes of a man of quality. The story goes that on a visit to Paris as Soviet Premier, Nikita Khrushchev boasted about his Foreign Minister, saying, "I can order Gromyko to sit on a chunk of ice and he stays there until the ice has melted." Replied De Gaulle: "I can order Couve to sit on a chunk of ice, and it won't even begin to melt."

Couve is a member of what the French call the H.S.P., for haute societe protestante (Protestant high society), a powerful minority descended from the Huguenots within a predominantly Catholic country. The son of a Reims judge, he has excelled at whatever he undertook. He graduated first in a class of 300 at Paris' famed Ecole Libre des Sciences Politiques, passed with highest marks the examinations to become an inspecteur des finances in the French civil service. By 1940, at 33, he had become the Finance Ministry's director of foreign exchange, but he disliked serving in Marshal Petain's Vichy government.

In 1943, he decided to join the Free French movement abroad. "Vichy was no longer a serious place," he says.

"My departure was quite unheroic, since I had a passport and a visa in good order for Spain." He made his way to Algeria, where De Gaulle appointed him Finance Minister in his exile government. When the general returned to Paris in triumph in 1945, Couve was given the No. 3 post in the Foreign Ministry. After five years at the Quai, Couve, who speaks four languages, went out as an ambassador to Cairo, NATO, Washington, and finally Bonn, where he was a favorite of Konrad Adenauer's. One day in 1958, while he was playing golf at Cologne, an urgent phone call came for him. De Gaulle, who had just returned to power, summoned him to Paris as Foreign Minister.

Couve developed an effective method of introducing De Gaulle's independent-minded policies to the rest of the world. His ploy was to play down the impact of any decision. "Naturell-ment" was his favorite expression, meaning that the decision was a natural, an inevitable one. De Gaulle's recognition of Red China, the eviction of U.S. forces from France, overtures to the East bloc, the refusal to sign the nuclear nonproliferation treaty--all were presented by Couve as the only solution to intolerable situations. When a foreign diplomat or newsman asked him a pointed, and therefore in his view "indiscreet," question, Couve feigned a dumfounded stare or an arched brow. His frequent responses were "I don't understand you" or "I don't see what you are getting at." Sometimes he turned the question back on the questioner. "Naturellement," he would reply to newsmen who wanted him to comment on some startling new twist in French diplomacy. "What astonishes you so much about that?"

At Common Market conferences, while the Italians waved their arms in frustration, the Dutch kneaded their hands in anger, and the Germans turned white with rage, Couve serenely sat chatting with his staff and quietly repeating non. On orders from De Gaulle, he blocked British entry to the Common Market, reversed the trend toward a political unification of Europe and shaped Common Market trade and tariff policies to suit French tastes. It was, above all, his performance in the Common Market debates that won the admiration of De Gaulle, who praised him as "the perfect exponent of French diplomacy."

Couve's cold severity was not reserved exclusively for Europeans. Two years ago, on a visit to Washington, Couve was invited to the White House, where President Johnson earnestly pleaded the U.S. case in Viet Nam for 35 minutes. Then he sat back to await Couve's response. Seconds passed. No response. Finally, Johnson asked if Couve had any comments. Couve simply stood up, bowed slightly, and murmured his adieux. He felt that John son's view and his were so widely divergent that there was no sense in even talking about them.

Though Couve is almost invariably frosty in public, his small coterie of friends claim that in private he is witty, charming and downright human. He lives a quiet private life with his wife Jacqueline in a Left Bank town house, manages to arrange his work schedule so that they have lunch at home three times a week. They have three married daughters and five grandchildren. He has a dachshund named Jason, plays golf most Sunday mornings (in the 80s), and likes the movies enough to queue up with the crowds along the Champs Elysees to see the latest detective flicks or Chaplain classics. Couve is also a connoisseur of wine. His favorite: Chateau-Latour.

Still, his forbidding public image makes Couve's personality a political issue in France. Though many Frenchmen recognize that his remoteness has been an effective diplomatic ploy, they worry that he may lack the capacity for compassion that a Premier in France should have at present. After all, his main duty will be to direct a reform program whose goal is to redress potentially explosive grievances in French society. Two of the major groups with which he must deal, the students and workers, are in no mood to accept highhanded treatment from the government. Still, Couve is a man of such undisputed talent and dedication that he may be able even to overcome his personal reserve in order to meet headlong the greatest challenge of an already distinguished career.

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