(5 of 7)
The Choice. The U.S. State Department last week was contemplating De Gaulle's rise with rather mixed feelings. Washington, which committed some errors in judgment about the tall Frenchman during the war, hopes that resentment will not make him any more stubborn and difficult than he was then. The Washington diplomats would prefer a continuation of Socialist Ramadier's coalition Government, but they realize that it is too weak to last. If the choice is between De Gaulle and the Communists, the U.S. choice is, of course, De Gaulle.
The Lieutenants. The No. 2 man in the R.P.F., its titular Secretary General, is Jacques Soustelle, 35, a heavy, slow-moving character who came to De Gaulle from the far left. He is an ex-professor (a Sorbonne-trained ethnologist), and joined a group called the "Vigilance Committee of anti-Fascist Intellectuals." In 1940 he joined the Free French movement in London, became its Minister of Information. An able organizer, he is a probable future Minister of the Interior (police).
The most interesting of De Gaulle's lieutenants, the one with the strongest intellectual and emotional influence on him, is André Malraux, director of Propaganda and Information. A tough man in European letters (where the catch-as-catch-can rules make U.S. champions look feeble), Malraux also came from the far left. He has an extremist's temperament but too much intelligence to be taken in by extremist ideology. In the Chinese Nationalist Revolution of 1927, he fought with the Communists, and in the Spanish Civil War with the Loyalists. His flame burns for freedom and the human values of the individual man. He says that it is not he who has changed, but the world. He broke finally with Communism at the time of the Hitler-Stalin pact in 1939.
In the French Army when the Germans invaded France, Malraux was captured, but escaped and, under the Resistance name of Colonel Berger, organized a Maquis section in the provinces east of Bordeaux. It was hit-&-run guerrilla warfare, dynamiting stores, ambushing convoys. In 1945 he advanced with the French Army into Germany, and there first met Charles de Gaulle, whom he had long admired. The two men took to each other at once.
Malraux's press attaché is Diomede Catroux, 31, nephew of General Georges Catroux, who was a notable Free French leader in Africa and the Near East and is now France's Ambassador to Moscow. Young Diomede has the manner of a languid intellectual, but he is a graduate of St.-Cyr (France's West Point) and had a fine war record as an infantry captain. Young Catroux, however, still has much to learn about newspapermen.
The Social and Professional Action Department is headed by a volatile, ambitious young man named Jacques Baumel. A big figure in the underground operating around Lyon, he became a member of the first Constituent Assembly after liberation. His R.P.F. job is national indoctrination "in depth, not on the surface." He has organized R.P.F. groups by classes and professions—for women, for veterans, for doctors, writers, artists, civil servants. It is his man-sized job to get French labor to trust De Gaulle.