De Gaulle had been not only intransigent, but rude to the point of insult—“a very stony interview,” as Churchill described it to the President. The Prime Minister thus begged the President not to see de Gaulle that night, but to put off the meeting to the next day, when de Gaulle would have had more time to simmer down.
The President, however, insisted de Gaulle be brought straight to him. Thus did the Free French major general arrive at the Villa Dar es Saada, along with two aides, at 10:20 p.m., “with black clouds swirling around his high head and with very poor grace” according to the President’s son:23 there to meet the U.S. commander in chief whose troops had “liberated” Algeria and Morocco.
15
An Acerbic Interview
IN A CABLE to his secretary of state, the President had explained just why he was attempting to accomplish a “shotgun” wedding of the Free French leader from London, where anti-Vichy feeling was high, and the French high commissioner under General Eisenhower from Algiers, where former Vichy administrators and officers still predominated. Though Roosevelt claimed it to be for unity of the French cause, the truth was, the President felt he must give critics of his use of former Vichy personnel in North Africa a sign—a symbol not just of reconciliation but proof that though the United States had acted out of expedience, it was fully resolved to defeat fascism in all its forms.
De Gaulle, unhappily, was loath to oblige—raising serious questions about what kind of “liberation” the Americans were intending to bring to Europe. “It had been my hope that we could avoid political discussions at this time,” the President cabled to Hull, in part to explain why he hadn’t thought to bring the secretary of state to Casablanca, “but I found on arrival that American and British newspapers had made such a mountain out of a rather small hill that I should not return to Washington without having achieved settlement of this matter.”1
Knocking de Gaulle’s and Giraud’s heads together, he imagined with presidential hubris, he would show the free world there was a good, just, fair, and effective alternative to Nazi rule, illustrated by men of goodwill coming together to make democracy work once again, as the Nazis were forced to retreat.
Sitting on the large sofa in the villa’s drawing room, the President thus bade de Gaulle sit beside him, and attempted, in his best conversational French, to apply salve to the major general’s wounded pride as a Frenchman summoned to appear before an American on what de Gaulle had always thought of as French soil: the President beginning by explaining how he’d come to Casablanca, as U.S. commander in chief, to discuss military operations against the Axis powers in the Mediterranean for the coming year. Mr. Stalin had been invited, but had been unable to leave the Stalingrad front. The purpose of the Casablanca meeting was, therefore, to “get on with the war,” and answer the question “Where do we go from here?”
In this context, the President elaborated, he appreciated there were different political views on how North Africa, once liberated from the Nazi yoke, should fare, but the war was not yet won; the “problem of North Africa should be regarded,” therefore, “as a military one and that the political situation should be entirely incident to the military situation.” How to bring “as much pressure as possible to bear on the enemy at the earliest possible moment” in Tunisia was the order of the day, he claimed;2 Admiral Darlan, for all his faults, had done his best to make this happen, and General Giraud, his successor, was doing the same. Surely, by moving his London Free French committee to Algiers and fusing it with Giraud’s organization, the war could be won more swiftly than if the French war effort were to be hobbled, right at the beginning, by political dissension?
De Gaulle, however, seemed to be a man from a different planet. That American forces had come thousands of miles, and suffered a thousand deaths at the hands of French troops while attempting to roll back the Axis tide and evict the Germans in North Africa as the first step toward the defeat of Hitler was—at least at that moment—a matter of complete indifference to the French general. He’d hoped, rather, for an invitation to come to Washington to meet with the President as the leader of the Free French movement, and for security reasons (Free French headquarters was reputed to leak like a proverbial sieve) had not been told of the Casablanca Conference—just as he had not been told beforehand of the Torch invasion. Feeling insulted, he’d therefore resisted Churchill’s invitation to fly out to Casablanca, not only out of pique, but because he foresaw matters of political importance being decided and would have no time to prepare for such discussions, he claimed. Forced nevertheless to present himself, on pain of the Free French movement being stripped of all funds and support in London, he’d reluctantly agreed to travel—promising nothing, however. His arrival at Medouina airport had then given him an indication how low he was on the American totem pole: no band playing “La Marseillaise”; the windows of the car taking him to Anfa soaped lest he be recognized; American troops and sentries everywhere—and in a country he considered a part of France, not a protectorate.
Interrupting Roosevelt, de Gaulle “made some remark to the President with reference to the sovereignty of French Morocco,” Captain McCrea wrote in his notes of the meeting that night—having been asked to stand outside while the President and the general talked. It was, he added, “a relatively poor point of vantage—a crack in a door slightly ajar,” and with the Frenchman’s voice so low “as to be inaudible to me.”3
Moroccan sovereignty was not what the President was prepared to discuss with the somewhat mad major general from London, however—especially after spending the evening with Morocco’s rightful ruler. Morocco had become a French protectorate only in 1912, barely thirty years ago; it could not by any stretch of the imagination be considered “French” soil, in the President’s eyes, and de Gaulle’s assumption that the country was to be reestablished as part of the “French Empire,” thanks to American blood and courage, aroused Roosevelt’s deepest anticolonial feelings.
Reestablishing imperial French sovereignty over colonized peoples promised a hiding to nothing, whereas the opportunity to get “advanced” Western nations to embrace the notion of responsible development in former colonies, encouraging global trade and education, would offer, he felt, mutual benefits. Above all, it would give moral purpose to the postwar democracies, especially if the struggle between capitalism and communism worsened. The President therefore dismissed de Gaulle’s remarks over French sovereignty over Morocco, “stating that the sovereignty of the occupied territories”—territories occupied now by U.S. forces of liberation—“was not under consideration.” Moreover, he stated, it would be up to the occupied countries—like mainland France, once liberated—to elect their own postwar governments to help decide such matters, not jump the gun and be saddled with decisions made by warring factions in exile; in fact, “none of the contenders for power in North Africa had the right to say that he, and only he, represented the sovereignty of France,” Roosevelt claimed—neither Giraud nor de Gaulle. “The President pointed out,” McCrea recorded, “that the sovereignty of France, as in our country, rested with the people, but that unfortunately the people of France were not now in a position to exercise that sovereignty. It was, therefore, necessary for the military commander in the area [General Eisenhower] to accept the political situation as he found it and to collaborate with those in authority in the country at the time that the occupation took place so long as those in authority chose to be of assistance to the military commander. The President stated that any other course of action would have been indefensible.”4
Nor did Roosevelt stop there. It was not, he said, simply a matter of temporary accommodation and practicality. With the whole of mainland France now under German occupation5 and no legitimate or elected French government in exile, it was the task of the Allies—the United Nations—“to resort to the legal analogy of ‘trusteeship,’” not committees of self-appointed exiles. It was the President’s view “that the Allied Nations fighting in French territory at the moment we
re fighting for the liberation of France and that they should hold the political situation in ‘trusteeship’ for the French people. In other words, the President stated that France is in the position of a little child unable to look out and fend for itself and that in such a case, a court would appoint a trustee to do the necessary.” He pointed out that General Giraud understood this very well, and wanted only “to get on with the war”—namely, the “urgent task of freeing French territory of the enemy.” Only then could questions of sovereignty, empire, and the like be addressed. “The President stated that following the Civil War in our home country, there was conflict of political thought and that while many mistakes were made, nevertheless, the people realized that personal pride and personal prejudices must often be subordinated for the good of the country as a whole, and the contending French leaders could well follow such a program. The only course of action that could save France, said the President, was for all her loyal sons to unite to defeat the enemy, and that when the war was ended, victorious France could once again assert the political sovereignty which was hers over her homeland and her empire. At such time all political considerations would be laid before the sovereign people themselves and that by the use of the democratic processes inherent throughout France and its empire, political differences would be resolved.”6
De Gaulle looked stunned by such paternalistic American arrogance. He’d endured, he felt, one insult after another that day. “No troops presented honors,” he later recalled of his arrival at Medouina, “although American sentries maintained a wide periphery around us.” Instead, some American cars had driven up to the plane. “I stepped into the first one,” he recorded—as well as his shame when Brigadier General William Wilbur, “before getting in with me, dipped a rag in the mud and smeared all the windows. These precautions were taken in order to conceal the presence of General de Gaulle and his colleagues in Morocco,” de Gaulle lamented, using the third person. Once inside the barbed-wire compound, moreover, he’d felt even more insulted. “In short, it was captivity,” he remembered feeling—a giraffe incarcerated in an American zoo. “I had no objection to the Anglo-American leaders’ imposing it on themselves, but the fact that they were applying it to me, and furthermore on territory under French sovereignty, seemed to me a flagrant insult.” Meeting five-star General Giraud, his former commander from 1940, that afternoon, de Gaulle—though a mere major general—blamed Giraud for not feeling similarly aggrieved. “What’s this? I ask you for an interview four times over and we have to meet in a barbed-wire encampment among foreign powers? Don’t you realize,” de Gaulle sneered, “how odious this is from a purely national point of view?”7
Giraud didn’t. In fact, given that U.S. troops had now liberated Morocco from Nazi control, as laid down under the 1940 armistice agreement, he considered de Gaulle the one who was odious and insulting, especially when de Gaulle had pulled from his pocket a copy of Giraud’s letter of loyalty to Marshal Pétain, written the previous spring after his escape from a German prison in Germany and seeking safety from the Nazis in Vichy France.8 Once Hitler had ordered the occupation of the whole of metropolitan France, Giraud had immediately revoked his letter, and had consented to be brought by Allied submarine to Algeria to take military command of the anti-Axis forces. He’d found it typical of de Gaulle to commence discussions of French unity by producing a copy of such a past document from his pocket; with de Gaulle, you were either subordinate to him or against him. Worst of all, de Gaulle’s main opponent seemed neither Hitler nor even Giraud, but the U.S. president.
“Franklin Roosevelt was governed by the loftiest ambitions,” de Gaulle allowed later—but not the sort of ambitions of which de Gaulle approved. “His intelligence, his knowledge and his audacity gave him the ability, the powerful state of which he was the leader afforded him the means, and the war offered him the occasion to realize them. If the great nation he directed had long been inclined to isolate itself from distant enterprises and to mistrust a Europe ceaselessly lacerated by wars and revolutions, a kind of messianic impulse now swelled the American spirit and oriented it toward vast undertakings,” the major general described in his haughty prose—undertakings, at any rate, that were antithetical to de Gaulle and to the reconstitution of the French Empire under him. Once America had “yielded” to “that taste for intervention in which the instinct for domination cloaked itself,” he recorded—ignoring France’s capitulation to Hitler, Japan’s attack at Pearl Harbor, and Hitler’s declaration of war on the United States—“from the moment America entered the war, Roosevelt meant the peace to be an American peace, convinced that he must be the one to dictate its structure, that the states that had been overrun should be subject to his judgment, and that France in particular should recognize him as its savior and arbiter.”9
This was not far from the truth. The fact that Americans, not Frenchmen, were being asked by their president and commander in chief to die, if necessary, to liberate de Gaulle’s country—a country that had put up the most feeble fight against the Germans in 1940, and had submitted to an abject armistice with almost no protest ever since, indeed had attempted to prevent U.S. forces from landing in Morocco and Algeria while not lifting a finger to stop the Germans from occupying Tunisia—was of zero interest to de Gaulle, who deprecated Roosevelt as “a star actor” unwilling to share the limelight de Gaulle craved. “In short, beneath his patrician mask of courtesy,” de Gaulle wrote, “Roosevelt regarded me without benevolence.”10
At 10:55 p.m. the interview came to an end. The “Frenchman unfolded his complete height,” Elliott recalled, “and marched with formality and no backward glance to the door.”11
The President was as put out as was de Gaulle. A seminal political encounter of the war had taken place, pitting American progressive political ideas against recalcitrant French imperialist ideology. There had certainly been no meeting of minds. What it showed was that the President’s views on postwar world democracy, as enshrined in the Atlantic Charter, were going to be very, very difficult to apply.
Churchill then came back to the Villa Dar es Saada and, together with Harry Hopkins, Robert Murphy, and Harold Macmillan, they rehashed the evening’s discussions and their implications.
Outwardly, the President seemed unconcerned. “Father seemed unperturbed by the mighty sulk to which de Gaulle treated him,” Elliott recalled, as well as his father’s philosophical attitude. “The past is past, and it’s done,” the President pronounced, attempting to be positive. “We’ve nearly solved this thing now. These two:”—meaning Generals Giraud and de Gaulle—“equal rank, equal responsibility in setting up the Provisional Assembly. When that’s done, French democracy is reborn. When that Provisional Assembly starts to act, French democracy takes its first steps. Presently French democracy will be in a position to decide for itself what is to become of Giraud, or of de Gaulle. It will no longer be our affair.”12 A democratically elected French government would decide.
In his own mind, however, Roosevelt was far from happy. He was already worried whether his notion of global postwar democracy, based on the Atlantic Charter, would be honored in Europe, once the Russians began pushing back the Germans on the Eastern Front.
The Soviets were a major concern. His brief interview with de Gaulle had indicated all too clearly, though, just how obstinately the old imperial powers would seek to reestablish and then hang on to their colonial possessions—the “unity of her vast Empire,” as de Gaulle proudly called it13—rather than pursue the ideal of postwar, postimperial commonwealths of sovereign countries bound by history and culture, not the gunboat. And in this respect, Churchill was little different from de Gaulle.
How, though, persuade those dying empires to embrace the future rather than the past? How encourage them to join in creating a new world order, not reestablish the tottering colonial empires that had doomed Europe and the Far East after World War I?
When Churchill finally left the House of Happiness at half past midnight, the Pres
ident went to bed but asked Elliott to sit with him, and in the quiet of his Casablanca villa, he unburdened his soul.
Though he’d said to Churchill they must move on with the prosecution of the war and not permit themselves to be sidetracked by French factionalism, the President was in truth deeply affected by his contretemps with de Gaulle.
“We’ve talked, the last few days,” the President told his son, “about gradually turning the civil control of France over to a joint Giraud–de Gaulle government, to administer as it is liberated. An interim control, to last only until free elections can again be held . . . but how de Gaulle will fight it!” he snorted. Not only did de Gaulle speak of himself as a sort of Joan of Arc, but his dream was the restoration of France on the back of its colonies. “He made it quite clear that he expects the Allies to return all French colonies to French control immediately upon their liberation. You know,” Roosevelt confided to his son, “quite apart from the fact that the Allies will have to maintain military control of French colonies here in North Africa for months, maybe years, I’m by no means sure in my own mind that we’d be right to return France to her colonies at all, ever, without first obtaining in the case of each individual colony some sort of pledge, some sort of statement of just exactly what was planned, in terms of each colony’s administration”14—much as Congress had done with regard to the Philippines in 1932.
Elliott was amazed. “Hey, listen, Pop. I don’t quite see this. I know the colonies are important—but after all, they do belong to France . . . how come we can talk about not returning them?”15
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