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February 19, 1991

The Chancellor’s [Helmut Kohl's] Telephone Conversation with French President Mitterrand, Tuesday, 19 February 1991, 11.30 - 11.40 hours

Kohl reports on his meeting with Iran's Foreign Minister Velayati and the latter's meeting with Iraq's Foreign Minister Aziz. Kohl and Mitterrand discuss Iran's plans for the country's return on the world stage after the end of the Gulf War.

February 20, 1991

The Chancellor’s [Helmut Kohl's] Telephone Conversation with U.S. President Bush on 18 February 1991

Kohl and Bush discuss the Gulf War. Kohl reports on his meeting with Iran's Foreign Minister Velayati and his recent telephone conversation with Gorbachev.

February 20, 1991

The Chancellor’s [Helmut Kohl's] Conversation with President Mitterrand at the Elysée on 15 February 1991

Kohl and Mitterrand examine the Soviet position in the Gulf War and the situation in the Baltics. 

January 17, 1991

The Chancellor's [Helmut Kohl's] Telephone Conversation with President Mitterrand on Thursday, 17 January 1991 at 5 pm

Kohl and Mitterrand talk about the start of allied military operations in the Gulf War and France's contribution in particular. 

November 22, 1990

The Chancellor's [Helmut Kohl's] Breakfast Meeting with President Mitterrand on Wednesday, 21 November 1990 in Paris for the Occasion of the CSCE Summit

Kohl and Mitterrand assess the relevance of the Paris CSCE Summit and the situation in the Gulf, especially UN resolutions on Iraq and the potential use of force under a UN mandate.

October 31, 1990

The Chancellor's [Helmut Kohl's] Telephone Conversation with Mr. Willy Brandt on Wednesday, 31 October 1990

Brandt agrees to Kohl's request to serve as a mediator and interlocutor for the Iraqi side in an effort to achieve the release of hostages in Iraq.

October 28, 1990

The Chancellor's [Helmut Kohl's] Meeting with President Mitterrand in Rome, on Sunday, 28 October 1990

 Kohl and Mitterrand debate the situation in the Gulf, the state of reforms in the Soviet Union, and the prospects for progress in terms of European integration.

July 15, 1991

Memorandum of Conversation: Meeting with Helmut Kohl, Chancellor of Germany on July 15, 1991

Bush, Kohl, and others discuss relations with France and France's views of NATO, talks between the US and the USSR over the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I), safeguarding the Brazilian rainforest, the Uruguay Round of the GATT, support for economic reforms in the Soviet Union, and US-German relations.

May 20, 1991

Memorandum of Conversation: Meeting with Helmut Kohl, Chancellor of Germany, May 20, 1991, 4:30-6:20 pm.

Bush and Kohl discuss Germany's place in Europe and in NATO, its relationship with France, the Uruguay Round of the GATT, and politics in France.

July 11, 1957

Letter, Jacques F. [illegible] to John Kennedy

On July 2, 1957, US senator John F. Kennedy made his perhaps best-known senatorial speech—on Algeria.

Home to about 8 million Muslims, 1.2 million European settlers, and 130,000 Jews, it was from October 1954 embroiled in what France dubbed “events”—domestic events, to be precise. Virtually all settlers and most metropolitan French saw Algeria as an indivisible part of France. Algeria had been integrated into metropolitan administrative structures in 1847, towards the end of a structurally if not intentionally genocidal pacification campaign; Algeria’s population dropped by half between 1830, when France invaded, and the early 1870s. Eighty years and many political turns later (see e.g. Messali Hadj’s 1927 speech in this collection), in 1954, the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) launched a war for independence. Kennedy did not quite see eye to eye with the FLN.

As Kennedy's speech shows, he did not want France entirely out of North Africa. However, he had criticized French action already in early 1950s Indochina. And in 1957 he met with Abdelkader Chanderli (1915-1993), an unaccredited representative of the FLN at the United Nations in New York and in Washington, DC, and a linchpin of the FLN’s successful international offensive described in Matthew Connelly’s A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria’s Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post-Cold War Era (2002). Thus, Kennedy supported the FLN’s demand for independence, which explains its very positive reaction to his speech.

And thus, unlike the 1952-1960 Republican administration of Dwight Eisenhower (1890-1969) that officially backed the views of NATO ally France and kept delivering arms, the Democratic senator diagnosed a “war” by “Western imperialism” that, together with if different from “Soviet imperialism,” is “the great enemy of … the most powerful single force in the world today: ... man's eternal desire to be free and independent.” (In fact, Kennedy’s speech on the Algerian example of Western imperialism was the first of two, the second concerning the Polish example of Sovietimperialism. On another, domestic note, to support African Algeria’s independence was an attempt to woe civil-rights-movement-era African Americans without enraging white voters.) To be sure, Kennedy saw France as an ally, too. But France’s war was tainting Washington too much, which helped Moscow. In Kennedy’s eyes, to support the US Cold War against the Soviet Union meant granting Algeria independence. The official French line was the exact opposite: only continued French presence in Algeria could keep Moscow and its Egyptian puppet, President Gamal Abdel Nasser, from controlling the Mediterranean and encroaching on Africa

French officials’ responses to Kennedy were correspondingly harsh. So were most French newspapers. Regular French citizens reacted, too, writing Kennedy mostly critical letters, as the text printed here exemplifies. But about a quarter of these letters, which are kept at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston, were supportive, for a slowly growing minority of metropolitan French criticized its government, mainly due to published accounts, by 1957 still mostly by Frenchmen, about the French army’s systematic use of torture in Algeria.

Pagination