Word: bevinism
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Union of Diplomats. After last year's smashing Labor victory, the victors got together to pick the portfolios for the new Cabinet. Clement Attlee, of course, would be Prime Minister, for only under his soothing leadership could country-bred Ernie Bevin work together with the "Cockney Sparrow" Herbert Morrison, whose warmth has won him a far larger personal following than Bevin's. Bevin himself wanted the power of the purse. Said he: "Give me five years as Chancellor of the Exchequer, and I will so alter this country that no one will ever change it back." Reticent, scholarly...
...Bevin turned out to be a much better boss than musty old Whitehall had hoped. He knew much more about Whitehall's business than it had expected. By & large, he left the coterie of career diplomats alone. Bevin is still short of topnotch diplomatic personnel. His star ambassador is Sir Archibald Clark Kerr, recently recalled from Moscow where, the Foreign Office felt, he was being wasted...
...Bevin rose above their level, tossed aside the numbing, ambiguous grandiloquence of traditional diplomacy which made international dialogue sound remote and unreal. He spoke as no statesman had ever spoken before in international councils. He spoke, and his example made others speak, as though UNO were not a precarious assembly of many nations, but a parliament of respectable and genuine power. He spoke up to the Russians as a great many plain people in pubs and corner drugstores had often wanted to speak. Gasped one European delegate: "My God! We are playing chess, and Bevin is playing darts...
Lessons of Life. Ernie Bevin is that kind of a man-impatient with the chessboard's strategic subtleties. Life had used him roughly from the first, had given him callouses where other men would have had scars. Born 65 years ago to bitter poverty in Winsford, a Somerset village, Ernie Bevin got an early introduction to strife and independence...
...Bevin leads a rather lonely life with his placid, greyish wife Florence, usually stays at a small, homelike flat on the top floor of the Foreign Office. He is rabidly jealous of his privacy and coldly forbidding toward most reporters. Confided one London correspondent last week: "The only way to get him is to call the Foreign Office switchboard and say in a firm voice: 'The flat, please...