851T.001/37
Memorandum of Conversation, by the Assistant Secretary of State (Berle)
M. Baudet46 came in to see me today at his request. He asked what our view was as to the retention of Governor Boisson in Dakar.
I said we did not presume to advise in that regard. But, I said, we did not have the same picture of Boisson as had been painted in the propaganda press here. Boisson had kept the Germans from infiltrating into Dakar. He had been of assistance in checking on and preventing the use of the port by German submarines. Without passing on the question which M. Baudet asked, we did not have the same impression of Boisson as that which apparently prevailed in some de Gaullist circles.
M. Baudet said that they did have against him the fact that he had stuck with the Pétain Government instead of striking out against the Germans immediately after the Armistice; and related a not unfamiliar line of complaint of that kind.
I said I could understand how they felt. On the other hand, the fact that some men had been slow to throw the French Government [Page 137] overboard was not, to my mind, conclusive. … I said that many very honest men would cling to their government, however mistaken they thought it might be, for a long time: I could not easily imagine a situation in which Americans would desert their government and go into exile; for that reason I thought the mere fact that men not forced to do so by points of honor had remained with the only government in France they could see, was not ground for wholesale condemnation. Indeed, in the unification of France a great many such men would be encountered, and to proscribe them might make more enemies than friends.
- Philippe Baudet had been a member of the Free French Delegation in the United States. Following the formation of the French Committee of National Liberation on June 3, he became Delegate ad interim of the French Committee of National Liberation in the United States; see memorandum by the Secretary of State, June 8, p. 141.↩