The Unvisit

Arriving in Bonn just 13 days after President Kennedy's triumphant visit, Charles de Gaulle made no effort to enter a popularity contest. Both French and Germans legitimately emphasized that the two-day trip was only a "work ing visit" as stipulated by the brand-new Franco-German Friendship Treaty. As far as protocol and the public were concerned, it was even a kind of unvisit --no parades, no crowds, none of the pageantry so dear to the heart of De Gaulle.

The Bonn press predicted that De Gaulle would try to whip the Germans into line in case they had got too friendly toward the U.S. He was not as crude as that. But he had been stung by Kennedy's Frankfurt speech about Atlantic unity (although dismissing it as "salade, salade, salade"), and De Gaulle obviously wanted to find out in Bonn if the Germans had been sufficiently impressed by it to move away from the Franco-German alliance. Answer: the Germans were just about standing still. They chided De Gaulle and his top ministers for the announced withdrawal of French naval units from the NATO fleet but did not press him on the question of Britain's eventual admission to the Common Market. There was some haggling on agriculture; because of a price-depressing agricultural surplus, which caused farm riots in southern France last week, the French had just closed their borders to imports of tomatoes and apricots, without notifying the Common Market. The only really substantive agreement: a massive youth exchange program.

Among other things, De Gaulle wanted to get to know Vice Chancellor Ludwig Erhard, the man who will take over from Konrad Adenauer next fall. They had an hour's "friendly" conversation. Actually, they talked past each other. De Gaulle kept stressing the mystique of Europe, while Erhard tried to talk economics but found that the General was as little interested in such matters as the Chancellor. As for the Franco-German treaty, De Gaulle managed to sound both hopeful and casual. "Treaties," he said with a shrug, "are like roses and young girls. They last while they last."

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