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Others were convinced he was a would-be dictator (or fascist, as the cheaper.cry had it). His career belies the charge. Once, in conversation with Novelist Andre Malraux, his wartime propaganda chief, De Gaulle declared: "One usually ascribes to me one quality: intelligence. Then how can one suppose that I am so unintelligent as to want to make a coup d'etat? . . . The era of the coup d'etat is past. It is an anachronism which does not at all correspond to my temperament." During the war, stubborn as he was with allies, he freely allowed himself to be overruled by Free France's Liberation Committee. And in the immediate postwar years, when France was in his hands and absolute power might have been his for the seizing, he accepted political extinction rather than violate "republican legality."
But, if he is no fascist, De Gaulle is beyond question an authoritarian prepared to demand vast emergency powers as Franklin Roosevelt once did. He has insisted that he would never again accept a ''temporary magistrature." Before he would consent to return to power, the National Assembly would have to agree to send itself on "permanent vacation," give De Gaulle a free hand until a new French constitution could be written. Under the new constitution, as De Gaulle envisages it, France would no longer be ruled by a single house of Parliament. (The French Senate is as meaningless as Britain's House of Lords.) Instead, the nation would have two coequal chambers dividing legislative power somewhat as the U.S. House and Senate do. For the executive, i.e., himself, De Gaulle would insist on power comparable to that wielded by the U.S. President.
In Strength, Generosity. The thought that France might now give De Gaulle such power disconcerted official Washington and official London. They recall the alliance that De Gaulle bilaterally negotiated with Russia in 1944 -unilaterally denounced by Russia in 1955 -and wondered whether De Gaulle would attempt to deal bilaterally with Moscow once again. And though France is treaty-bound to NATO for the next eleven years. Washington remembers that De Gaulle once described NATO as "an American protectorate without even the benefit of efficient protection." Still suspicious of Germany, he is less of a European than France's recent Premiers. He would make France a difficult ally.
But on second Washington and Whitehall thought, a difficult but stable government (if De Gaulle could bring it off) might contribute more to the defenses of the West than all the lip service paid to "Western unity" by all the weak Premiers of France in the past decade. It would be worth some dissension to have a French government capable of halting the steady diminution of Western prestige in Asia and Africa caused by the Algerian war.