Burned Hands Across the Sea

Before official Washington could get out if town for the long weekend, Massachusetts' Democrat John Fitzgerald Kennedy set off a cannon cracker in the Senate that rattled the windows at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue and painfully burned an ally 3,800 miles away. The Kennedy rework: an urgent appeal for the U.S. to step into the bloody Algerian rebellion against French rule and lend its weight to the cause of Algerian independence.

In dealing with Algeria, the Eisenhower Administration has tried to avoid offending either the Asian-African nations, which are fervently on the side of the rebels, or France, bitterly fighting to keep a hold in her most prized overseas territory. In the United Nations the U.S. has gone along with France's claim that the crisis is a French internal problem.

Without Links? Such a "head-in-the-sands" policy, charged Kennedy in a full-dress speech, has proved a dismal flop, with the U.S. standing by, the costly Algerian war has dragged on and on, weakening France, dimming French prospects of salvaging some economic links with North Africa out of the wreckage of empire, and enfeebling the NATO defense against Communism by tying down 400,000 French troops. Worst of all, the U.S.'s "retreat from the principles of independence and anticolonialism" has damaged "our standing in the eyes of the free world, our leadership in the fight to keep that world free . . .

"Perhaps it is already too late . . . to save the West from total catastrophe in Algeria," said Kennedy. "But we dare not fail to make the effort." What the U.S. should press for, he argued, is a solution under which Algeria would win political independence but France would keep some form of economic "interdependence." He urged the Senate to pass a double-barreled resolution calling upon the Administration to try to bring about an independence-with-interdependence settlement through NATO or the "good offices" of Tunisian and Moroccan leaders, and, if there is no substantial progress toward the goal by the time the U.N. General Assembly meets next September, to support "an international effort" toward the goal of Algerian independence.

Without Nightmares? To Administration ears, Kennedy's Algeria speech sounded like troublesome meddling, possibly part of the buildup of his stock as a Democratic presidential nominee in 1960. Secretary of State Dulles at his news conference replied that he would be "very sorry" to see the Algerian crisis, with its "great difficulty and complexity," become a U.S. problem. And "if anyone is interested in going after colonialism," said Dulles, he should look to the enslaved nations behind the Iron Curtain. Added Dwight Eisenhower at his midweek press conference: the "best role" for the U.S. is to "try to be understanding to both sides in any quarrel . . . That means often you work behind the scenes because you don't get up and begin to shout about such things, or there will be no effectiveness."

The Washington comments were mild compared to what the French were saying. In Brest, French organizations conspicuously boycotted U.S. Fourth of July celebrations in protest. Rumbled irate Defense Minister Andre Morice: "I don't know if Monsieur Kennedy spends peaceful nights without nightmares, but I do know that [his help to the Algerian rebels] will cost many more innocent lives and help prolong a drama that would have ended long ago if thoughtless friends had weighed their words and acts."

Kennedy acknowledged that his aim was to wake up the world to the Algerian situation. But his cannon cracker had done more than that. By sorely annoying the hard-pressed French and pushing the State Department into a position that sorely annoyed Africans and Asians, it seemed to have been all bang and no benefit.

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