Word: bevin
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...When the Marshall proposals were announced," said Ernie Bevin in Britain last week, "I grabbed them with both hands...
Dinner in Paris. When Ernie Bevin padded across Westminster's central lobby one day last week, M.P.s looked anxiously at each other. Why was he wasting time in London? But Ernie had merely dropped into the House for a quick lunch. That afternoon, his twin-engined Dakota set him down at Le Bourget. Behind a motorcycle escort with whistles blowing, he and a carful of mild, bespectacled Foreign Office experts drove to the British Embassy on the Rue du Faubourg St. Honoré. For three hours Bevin and British Ambassador Duff-Cooper sat in low armchairs overlooking the Embassy...
...also made sense to invite the Russians into the great enterprise. Bevin and Bidault quickly saw that. So did Jean-Jacques Granier, 28, a Paris bank clerk currently on strike. Said he: "If the Russians want to come in, that's fine. If they don't, tant pis. That's their business. Ours is to take this chance-mais tout de suite." Although the Communist press grumbled at the Marshall plan, observers believed that even the majority of French Communist voters welcomed it and saw in it the one hope for a stable, peaceful Europe...
...Bevin flew back to London two days later, and in a memorable speech in the House of Commons he made official Jean-Jacques Granier's reaction. Pounding a dispatch box with his heavy hands, Bevin said: "The reply of the Soviet Government is awaited . . . [but] I shall not be a party to holding up the economic recovery of Europe by the finesse of procedure, or terms of reference, or all the paraphernalia which may go with it." Bevin added that he as Foreign Secretary of Britain had been helpless because he had "neither coal nor goods nor credit...
Economic conferences would start immediately. Moscow, after some-confusion, decided to pull up for a closer look. The Russians complained that they did not know what the Marshall plan meant-or what Bevin and Bidault had been up to-but they agreed to a British-French-Russian exploratory conference in Paris, this week...