By the spring of 1962, the political and military-strategic differences between Kennedy and de Gaulle had brought about a significant deterioration in their bilateral relationship – and word of this was increasingly making it to newspapers and editorials. Prominent journalists and columnists such as Joseph Alsop (of the New York Herald Tribune) and Cyrus Sulzberger (of the New York Times) were writing that “in the whole history of the Western alliance there has been nothing like the present remarkably ugly relationship between France and the US.” Walter Lippmann's considerable esteem for de Gaulle also suffered as the anti-Anglo-Saxon gist of the Frenchman's policies became increasingly clear; “my present mood,” he wrote in a letter to British journalist Barbara Ward Jackson in May 1962, “is to take an increasingly strong stand against de Gaulle, designed especially to detach his German satellite – and I hope and believe Jean Monnet and his friends will eventually come out on top.”

The Franco-American quarrel turned into a veritable transatlantic crisis in January 1963, when de Gaulle scuttled Kennedy's Grand Design for an Atlantic partnership by vetoing British membership of the Common Market and rejecting the multilateral nuclear force (MLF) proposed by the United States. De Gaulle's challenge to the Atlantic partnership idea was also much reinforced by his signing of a bilateral treaty with West Germany – the Franco-German Treaty of Reconciliation. De Gaulle's “thunderbolt” of January 1963 certainly marked a watershed in Franco-American relations during the Cold War. Franco-American differences over the transatlantic relationship could still be papered over by diplomats during the first four years of de Gaulle's presidency; in early 1963, however, they reached full public view and would be impossible to ignore henceforth. But the clash of 1963 was to have much wider implications than for the Franco-American relationship alone. For one, it would deeply affect American long-term policies toward Europe.

At Loggerheads On All Fronts (Spring of 1962)

Before we delve into the run-up to the clash and the clash itself, it should be noted that the friction between Washington and Paris in 1962 resulted at least in part from serious differences over the handling of the Cold War crisis over Berlin (which had flared up after the grim Kennedy-Khrushchev meeting in Vienna in June 1961 and had reached its nadir with the erection of the Berlin Wall in August 1961).