Ok, I did some reserach on why Americans and French hate each other.
Turns out a lot of it stems from the Algerian War and the Suez Crisis. France had North Africa as their colonial stomping ground. Now, of course, old Rommel took that off them, but after WW2 France got it back .
Trouble is that colonisation had become a dirty word, so after some arm twisting France gave Tunisia and Morocco its independence. But not Algeria, which was considered part of France by the French: it had 1.5 million Frenchmen living there. The Algerians were like the Palestinians, fighting for their homeland, and assisted by Nasser's Egypt. Nasser was the Egyptian dictator who believed in a pan-Arab union. Nasser seized the Suez Canal, and the UK, France and Israel stepped in to make him give it back.
The Soviet Union was so peeved with this that it threatened to rain missiles on London and Paris. The French turned to the Americans and said, "Under NATO obligations, tell Khruschev to fuck off." Eisenhower said, "Tell him yourself, you French morons," and compelled the Brits to pull out of the Suez (Eisenhower wanted to look good to the Arabs back then). The French couldn't go it alone so they pulled out of Suez too. The French were shitty about the US not backing them up in the crunch, according to their treaty obligations.
It got worse. Algeria became a real problem, with rogue French army units, torture of civilians, and incursions into Tunisia by the French using US weaponry given to the French to fight the Soviets, not to oppress Algerians. France considered it was protecting its sovereign territory whereas everyone else thought they were being murderous arseholes. Esp. the US, who were threatening to back the Algerians in the UN. The French thought the US were trying to take their place in North Africa, and were intensely suspicious of what the US was doing. And because they considered Algeria to be part of France, they thought that NATO should back them up in the defence of Algeria from terrorists.
Eventually de Gaulle came back to power and gave Algeria up (the motivation for the guys trying to kill him in the book, the Day of the Jackal). Still, lots of bad blood.
