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Article: Maybe De Gaulle Was Right
- Article from:
- The Washington Post
- Article date:
- September 22, 1988
- Author:
CopyrightThis material is published under license from the Washington Post. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Washington Post. (Hide copyright information)
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Lauris Norstad was one of those rare Americans who listened to
Charles de Gaulle and to whom de Gaulle returned the compliment. The
death last week of the retired American general, at age 81 in
Arizona, comes as the French have embarked on one of their periodic
reassessments of de Gaulle. Both events should spur Americans to
engage in a similar exercise of reflection.
That is, Americans would do well in this electoral season of
overheated red-white-and-blue rhetoric to pause and consider a
proposition Norstad lived by during his remarkable career as a
soldier-diplomat, even though it occasionally got him into trouble in
Washington: wisdom about how America should exercise its power and ...