204
PARTISAN REVIEW
ete renverse par deux jeunes reporters - fouinent, intriguent,
papotent, curieux du destin des senateurs ou des rois lointains
Nor was Aron viscerally attracted to the American press, whose
sense of duty and tradition of telling all the truth he deplored at least
with respect to Pompidou's disease. Aron referred to the "articles im–
pitoyables" in the American press which showed the ravages of Pom–
pidou's disease, whereas he felt that "la presse
fran~aise
se montra
d'une decence exemplaire." Such a reaction showed to what an ex–
tent Aron failed to understand the very mechanism of American
public democracy and the right to know. Aron was out of touch with
American society's internal values, and probably shared George Ken–
nan's increasing distaste for populist America. For him America re–
mained the cold philosophical incarnation of democracy and world
power, the central element of his analytical exercises, the bastion of
liberty, but not a vibrant, contradictory reality. In this as in so many
other aspects, Aron remained quintessentially "French": his Atlan–
ticism was as French as de Gaulle's nationalism.
In effect, what prevented Aron from espousing a European
"third way" equidistant from the United States and the Soviet
Union, an idea which underpinned de Gaulle's "grand dessein," was
his pessimism vis
a
vis any specific sense of a European mission, and
his awareness that attempts to consider the Soviet Union as nothing
more than a new incarnation of Russia derived from wishful think–
ing or empty optimism. There could be no Europe from "the Atlantic
to the Urals" as long as the Soviet Union existed as such; only
changes in its internal government could make such a European pro–
ject viable, but such changes would amount to the Soviet Union's
ideological destruction. For Aron, Europe could exist only thanks to
the American presence; otherwise it would be submerged in the
Soviet empire, given its unwillingness to assume its own defense.
De Gaulle's international gamble was thus for Aron highly dan–
gerous.
It
could be in part explained in the 1960s by the fact that at
the time America was the only superpower with a far-reaching
global capacity for action. France could presume in such a context to
strike out on its own as a counterbalancing force. In the 1970s any
Gaullist third way would be dangerous, given the Soviet Union's rise
to world power. Europe could no longer afford to be anti-Atlanticist.
In this context it was highly symbolic of Aron's intellectual rigor that
