General Charles de Gaulle, preparing to visit Washington, put in a week of shrewd preliminaries.
Behind the Siena front in Italy, he decorated the U.S. Fifth Army's Lieut. General Mark Clark with the sunburst plaque of Grand Officer of the Legion of Honor. De Gaulle's point: he was the Frenchman entitled to confer French honors.
In Rome, he had himself presented to the Pope as le president, held a press conference, implied willingness to write off Mussolini's "stab in the back" as a historic error for which the Italian people are not responsible. De Gaulle's point: postwar France will be postwar...
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