Hot Radishes

It was a festive day in Ecuador last September when Charles de Gaulle swooped into Quito to begin a 25-hour state visit, the third stop on his ten-nation tour of Latin America. Enthusiastic crowds thronged the roads, jammed the balconies, and clambered on rooftops to shower the French leader with confetti and cries of "Viva De Gaulle!"

In the National Palace, De Gaulle presented each of the four delighted members of the ruling military junta with one of France's most distinguished medals, the golden sunburst of a "Grand Officer of the Legion of Honor."

When De Gaulle departed, things were definitely looking up for France's grand design--at least in Ecuador. Then came trouble. Though De Gaulle had given each of the four junta members the Grand Officer, he had bestowed the much more exclusive "Grand-Croix of the Legion of Honor" on the heads of state in all the other countries he visited.

When the Ecuadorians demanded how come, the French Foreign Office firmly explained that there was no intention to insult Ecuador, but there could only be one Grand-Croix given per country. If one country got four, the others with only one might feel slighted.

Not at all appeased, the Ecuadorians have now told De Gaulle to keep his medals and have sent them winging back to Paris. For punctuation, a bomb exploded last week in front of the French embassy in Quito, knocking a hole in the embassy's brick balustrade and shattering windows in the embassy and the ambassador's residence. To those who suggested that France should have presented one Grand-Croix to the junta as a whole. Paris' Le Figaro posed the problem. "How," it asked, "to get one ribbon of the Grand-Croix around a junta without making the recipients look like a bunch of radishes?"

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