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Then there is the Atlantic Alliance and Charles de Gaulle, whose mother clearly wasn't frightened by anybody. Fulbright worries about him and complains: De Gaulle has said "the nastiest, meanest things ever said about us." Fulbright considers nationalism the world's strongest political force, and he deplores De Gaulle's use of it. He sees De Gaulle as a modern Bismarck who would "unite a small community at the cost of dividing a larger one"—that is, unite Europe at the cost of dividing the Western Atlantic community. De Gaulle's notion that a continental rather than an Atlantic-oriented Europe could include the Communist satellites and draw them away from Russia does not impress Fulbright.
But when it comes to MLF, Fulbright has suggested that it should not be pushed against the wishes of De Gaulle and other Europeans. He feels that his view has been vindicated by President Johnson, who has pulled the State Department back from the MLF crusade and seems bent on telling De Gaulle: "Man cher, il faut qu'on raisonne ensemble." Fulbright thinks De Gaulle is unshakable but would like to see Lyndon try reasoning with him.
"Unthinkable Thoughts." Beyond these questions, any debate about whether the U.S. has overextended it— self, whether the U.S. ought to retrench, must consider the general question of how to deal with Communism. That is the question Fulbright took up in his "Old Myths and New Realities" speech, in which he urged the U.S. "to start thinking some unthinkable thoughts." Fulbright's central thought was entirely thinkable: the U.S. must stop hoping for ultimate global victory over Communism. In a nuclear world, reasoned Fulbright, the U.S. simply could not "either win the cold war or end it immediately and completely." The Communists, said Fulbright, had learned that lesson too, notably after the Cuban missile confrontation, in which the Soviet Union "tacitly accepted" American strategic superiority.
In all this, Fulbright in a sense only ratified the progression of U.S. thinking from "rolling back the Iron Curtain" to containment to coexistence. But in a similar speech he went beyond that in arguing that Communism is not only splintering but changing profoundly beneath its still-rigid ideological surface. "Men do not repudiate the doctrines and dogmas to which they have sworn their loyalty," he said, but they do "rationalize, revise and reinterpret them to meet new needs and new circumstances, all the while protesting that their heresy is purest orthodoxy."