What the CIA knew and wrote about Jacques Chirac

Sunday newspaper

September 30, 2019

"Intelligent, dynamic, warm, authentic, persuasive..." From the appointment of Jacques Chirac , just elected MP for Corrèze, as Pompidou's Secretary of State for Employment in April 1967, American diplomats posted in Paris never stopped no praise for this young 34-year-old "athletic-looking" enarque. According to them, he has a "taste for adventure", since he spent a summer as a waiter in Boston in 1953, before criss-crossing the United States as the driver of the widow of a Texan billionaire. Above all, he has to his credit "close ties with the Prime Minister which enabled him to be elected to the Assembly and the aura of success that surrounds him".

Invited with other Gaullist leaders to the United States Embassy on October 16, 1967, Jacques Chirac impresses his interlocutors because he evokes his trips across the Atlantic and his short aborted romance with a fiancée from South Carolina: "He seems to be as American – and not just pro-American – as many Americans,” enthuses Ambassador Charles Bohlen. Chirac was "the revelation of lunch"!

Chirac, an "Americanophile" Gaullist

From then on, the Americans closely followed his meteoric rise. In a note from June 1972, they describe him as "one of the brightest stars among the Gaullist leaders of the new generation", likely to one day replace Jacques Chaban-Delmas at Matignon, with a leaning more (... ) Read more on LeJDD

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