Word: bevans
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...this complacent state, they put down first at Moscow en route to Peking. Heading the pack was former Prime Minister Clement Attlee, accompanied by Nye Bevan, Labor Party Secretary Morgan Phillips, Labor Chairman Wilfred Burke, onetime Minister of National Insurance Edith Summerskill and Trade Union Leaders Harry Earnshaw, Sam Watson and Harry Franklin. Moscow's richest and reddest carpets were rolled out. A flecon of Russia's finest perfume, "The Spirit of the Red Army," was waiting in her hotel room to greet Dr. Summerskill, the only woman in the party. Soviet Premier Georgy Malenkov even went...
Socialist Attlee sat down to a flurry of congratulations from his own party. The tone of his speech had forestalled even Nye Bevan, who afterward admitted to friends, "Clem said all I would have said...
Then Winston Churchill began agreeing with Attlee, Bevan...
...heard. Churchill, as War Secretary in 1919, had tried to stop the Russian revolution by armed intervention and by starving it out, and now he was trying to do the same thing with the Chinese revolution, he charged. "Churchill is as stupid in 1954" as he was then, cried Bevan. "We shall bring upon us a third and last world war by not realizing that you cannot do anything with these revolutionaries except to work with them, help them through their difficulties, and not make it necessary for them to oppress their own people...
Best guess was that Bevan would be willing to risk thumping defeat to dramatize his cause. That, and the cloak of martyrdom, might be what frustrated Nye was seeking. Years ago he had written: "My concern was with one practical question . . . Where was power, and which the road to it?" He had still to find the answer...