Could the Cold War have ended at the turn of the 1960s? This chapter argues against viewing the downing of Gary Powers' U-2 plane as an unfortunate incident that precluded a superpower agreement. Khrushchev skillfully used the incident to embarrass Eisenhower and ruin the May 1960 Paris summit. However, it is doubtful that Khrushchev could have ever made the concessions – not least over Berlin – that would have led to the end of the Cold War. He remained determined to defend his revolutionary credentials, particularly against his Chinese critics. Fundamentally, the Soviet Union faced an identity crisis: was it a content superpower seeking to maintain its position or the center of world revolution aiming to overthrow the existing order? The roads not taken in 1960 remain unknown, but the sequence of events that played out over the spring and summer of 1960 led to a heating up of the Cold War.

After the Second World War, countries across occupied Europe were faced with the challenge of restoring political stability at home and peace abroad. Although extremist sentiment had not disappeared, moderate elites resolved to choke it off at the source by building robust bureaucratic parties that could incorporate the masses. Christian democratic parties on the right and moderate social democratic parties on the left took power all across the continent, ushering in an unprecedent period of stability. Yet with the economic stagnation of the 1970s, this consensus began to unravel, giving rise to the emergence of populist alternatives. This chapter departs from existing explanations for this turnaround. It shows that the populist strategy was always most effective in the patronage-based party systems of southern Europe. In northwest Europe, in contrast, bureaucratic parties have adapted, substituting professionalized service provision for mass membership and participation.

This chapter demonstrates the entrenchment of the dominant image of France as weak and poised to tip into revolution. Tensions with the State Department and between Secretary of State James Byrnes and President Harry Truman, the influence of Admiral William Leahy over the intelligence process, and Truman’s preference for military and current intelligence over more comprehensive analyses served to buttress alarmist assessments and legitimized a harder line, even as analysts in the nascent Central Intelligence Group began to question some of the more ominous reporting. In France, anti-communist elements encouraged American attention and aid by warning of secret communist plots involving weapons drops, arms caches, and covert preparations for insurrection, and they themselves as the resistance to these communist plots, willing to act once they received American assistance. Surprisingly, they also advocated for direct American intervention in French affairs, not only in shaping the electoral landscape but also in reestablishing military bases inside France. Meanwhile, other national intelligence services, in their exchanges with US intelligence, also sounded the alarm about communist activity in southern France and questioned the legitimacy and efficacy of the French government. These contacts only reinforced the American belief that France was a weak and unreliable ally.

This chapter explores the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. Increasingly, Provisional Government head Charles de Gaulle and the French Communist Party, for a time maintaining a veneer of Resistance unity, found themselves in a struggle over the complexion of postwar France. The perception of a communist threat, for many in the French government and their American allies, became pressing as new variables complicated relations and intensified the feeling of crisis. The PCF’s growing strength and popularity in domestic politics, and deteriorating relations with the Soviets, brought the threat to the forefront and shaped French domestic and foreign affairs. Some French factions continued to warn of communist subversion and intrigue through their exchanges with US diplomats and American intelligence. Gaullists sought out contact with U.S. intelligence officers to counter the weakness narrative and prove their anti-communist bona fides. For their part, OSS and (subsequently) State Department intelligence analysts argued that many in France viewed the PCF as a legitimate political party and that there were genuine working class grievances that should be addressed. These contacts—informal and formal—acted as powerful constraints on American policy and explain in sharper relief how the United States was drawn into French affairs.

This chapter depicts France on the eve of Liberation as various factions jockeyed for legitimacy and rightful claim to lead France once Paris was free again. It reveals a debate within US government circles about the accuracy of the entrenched image of France at the onset of the Cold War as decadent and teetering toward revolution. In exchanges with the White House, State Department and military intelligence, right-leaning French sources, including familiar military, intelligence, political and industrial figures, bolstered this view. French contacts in the Resistance meanwhile shaped Office of Strategic Services analysis that France was a strong, worthy ally. Thus France became a contested idea with warring factions in both capitals, as well as the far reaches of the French empire, seeking to influence US policy.

The chapter looks at Clementine Churchill’s often neglected position as her husband’s closest advisor and greatest influence. It begins by recounting the attributes she brought to the role, including championing the role of women in wartime and offering personal ‘protection’ to Winston at times of great stress, such as the eve of the D-Day landings. Her role as a British ‘First Lady’ is explored; attending key wartime conferences, editing and rehearsing Churchill’s speeches, and managing high-level international diplomacy with de Gaulle, Roosevelt and Stalin. However, her most important role was in managing Winston, monitoring her husband’s behaviour and restraining him when the need arose. It was a role that absorbed almost all of her energy and time, leaving her little of either for herself or her family.

“Occupied France,” analyzes the realities and myths about everyday life in France under German occupation. The French did not actively resist the occupation until 1943–1944. The chapter attempts to explain the unique character of the villagers of Graignes and why they refused to countenance the presence of Germans in their region. The villagers dismissively referred to the Germans as the Boches. The chapter concludes by examining the training and organization of the 17th SS Panzergrenadier Division, which appeared in south-central France in 1943.

The debate over the Fall of France has pivoted on whether its causes were rooted in a structural dysfunction of the French Republic and a defeatism that infected its citizens and soldiers, or were merely contingent – that is, a combination of the surprise and speed of the German advance, and Gamelin’s Dyle–Breda plan miscalculation, that allowed the Germans to concentrate their best troops on the French hinge at Sedan, which gave way when French soldiers panicked at Bulson.Using the documents on the secret post-war “Committee for the Investigation of Suspicious Withdrawals,” this chapter sequences the French collapse at Sedan and Bulson. Because soldier panics are not an exceptional event in warfare, Bulson does not by itself offer evidence of a lack of French will to fight. What made Bulson critical was its strategic consequences. The chapter also examines the three armored counterattacks conducted by de Gaulle. Although they became part of his legend as a man of tactical and operation prescience, in fact, they were improvized and totally ineffective.