A Certain Idea of France: The Life of Charles de Gaulle

by Julian T. Jackson

The story that at one lunch, where Admiral Leahy was present, Roosevelt turned to his former Ambassador to Pétain and said he should be drinking Vichy water, is probably apocryphal. And another story recounted by an American observer that, to break the ice after one dinner, the Chair of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, who was also a professional entertainer, offered a mystified de Gaulle a trick cigar, seems improbable.36 De Gaulle’s account of the visit in his Memoirs does not dwell on such trivialities but drips with irony. He remembers Cordell Hull as displaying an ‘elevation of soul’ that was ‘handicapped by his limited knowledge of everything that was not America’. He tells us that before leaving he presented Roosevelt with the gift of a small mechanical submarine made by the workers of the arsenal of Bizerta and that in return Roosevelt gave him a photograph dedicated to ‘General de Gaulle who is my friend’.37 (What de Gaulle did not know was that Roosevelt passed on the submarine at Christmas to his youngest grandchild Curtis. When his wife pointed out that it was not proper to dispose in this way of a present from a head of state, Roosevelt replied that de Gaulle was only head of ‘some French committee’.)38