The Americans and Soviets continued their stare-down in Europe, but U.S. presidents and Western European leaders butted heads as well, with some frequency. After the Soviets built a fortified wall across Berlin in 1961, the West Germans became angry at what they perceived as American reluctance to challenge the Soviets.

U.S. President John Kennedy and West German Chancellor Conrad Adenauer had such an angry meeting in April 1961 that they afterward agreed to destroy the written record of it. (Kennedy later spun history in his favor, by visiting Berlin in 1963 and uttering his famous declaration in German, "I am a Berliner.") French President Charles de Gaulle became even more contentious toward the U.S., pulling France out of NATO and blocking the British from joining the European common market, partly on the grounds that the United Kingdom was "tied to the United States by all kinds of special agreements."

The European public long had been enamored of American music and movie stars, but by the mid-1960s, there was growing disillusionment about the sorry state of U.S. race relations and the escalating U.S. war in Vietnam. European students marched in protest against the war, and some countries harbored U.S. military deserters and draft resisters. At the same time, Europe and the United States became even more intertwined economically, as larger numbers of U.S. manufacturers set up shop in Europe to get a share of the tariff-protected marketplace there.

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