De Gaulle never lost sight of his aim to restore France's position of eminence in world politics, not even as it teetered on the brink of civil war over Algeria. On September 17, 1958, he threw down an unusual gauntlet, merely three months after having resumed the reins of power and eleven days before a new constitution was approved by the French people. He wrote a secret memorandum to President Dwight Eisenhower and British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan proposing a shake-up of the Western alliance. De Gaulle advocated a new “security organization” in which the United States, Great Britain, and France would make “joint decisions on political questions affecting world security” and draw up “strategic plans of action, notably with regard to the employment of nuclear weapons.” De Gaulle was thus in effect demanding a say in America's global policies and a veto over the use of American nuclear weapons. He furthermore suggested that the world be carved up among the three nations in “theaters of operations,” which were to be “subordinated” to the new organization. The memorandum furthermore issued a veiled threat to NATO, since de Gaulle wrote that France “subordinates to it [the new security organization] as of now all developments of its present participation in NATO […].” In essence, as de Gaulle observed in his memoirs, he proposed that “the alliance should henceforth be placed under a triple rather than dual direction, failing which France would take no further part in NATO developments and would reserve the right […] either to demand its reform or to leave it.”

De Gaulle's “tripartite” memorandum is well known. What is less known is the extent to which it preoccupied diplomatic relations between Washington, London, and Paris. For much of the 1960s, French diplomats encouraged the notion that the United States had never replied to de Gaulle's memorandum (until the United States Senate set the record straight following France's withdrawal from NATO). Eisenhower's written reply of October 20, 1958, was in fact only the beginning of an elaborate correspondence and a prolonged series of diplomatic contacts. While the gist of the initial reply was unmistakably negative, Eisenhower recognized that de Gaulle had raised fundamental questions about the Western alliance that could not be ignored. He was furthermore concerned with the repercussions of a complete rejection for French participation in NATO.