ABSTRACT
The administration of US President John F. Kennedy often felt like it was in the Lewis Caroll novel Alice in Wonderland when it dealt with challenges posed by French President Charles de Gaulle. The Kennedy administration viewed Gaullism as an irrational cult of national vanity based on the charisma of the French general. In one colorful assessment, the president’s special assistant, Arthur Schlesinger Jr, passed along a characterization provided by Pierre Mendès-France, a former French prime minister, that suggested there was “a strain of madness in de Gaulle. He once said to me ‘I have two brothers. One is crazy, and we had him put away. The other is normal. I am in between.’”2
