Word: bidault
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When he rose to deliver his accounting, Mendès got a one-minute ovation-very warm from the Communist left, warm from the Gaullist right, scattered or nonexistent from the moderate center, where ex-Foreign Minister Georges Bidault cocked his head towards a wall and elaborately did nothing. Palais Bourbon's tiny shelflike visitors' boxes were crowded; most of the diplomatic corps was there...
...sheer surprise, even the Socialists joined the Gaullists in applauding. But the M.R.P. benches were silent. Resentful of Mendèes' takeover of the Foreign Ministry, which had been for so long their province under Bidault and Robert Schuman, the M.R.P. was increasingly hostile, increasingly apprehensive of Mendèes' course. MRPers repeated their charge that Mendes planned a complete capitulation to the Communists. Snapped Bidault: "Never before has one Frenchman done as much to cut off the arms France extends to her allies." In the press, Maurice Schumann, longtime Quai d'Orsay lieutenant of Robert Schuman...
Sounding Board. To organize and kindle this new enthusiasm, rising young newspaperman Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, publisher of the intellectual magazine L'Express, began a series of informal diners du travail. Jacques Soustelle, De Gaulle's bright young lieutenant, came, so did young MRPers of Bidault's party like André Monteil and Robert Buron, and Socialists like Robert Lacoste and Gaston Defferre. Says Servan-Schreiber: "First, we had to get a sounding board for Mendès. With his isolation in Parliament, he made brilliant speeches but there was no political echo. Secondly, he had always...
Mendès waited. He was content to have Bidault try to negotiate an end to the Indo-China war. Let the opponents of negotiations negotiate, he said, because they are tougher. But Mendès always insisted that Geneva was folly, that the only way to get peace was through direct negotiation with the Viet Minh. "Really, your policy is incomprehensible," he told Bidault. "You ask Mao to stop aid to Ho. Why should he make you this gift?" Mendès also suspected another motive behind Bidault's policy: Bidault's hope that the U.S. could...
Unanswered Questions. French partisans of EDC mistrust Mendès. Last week Bidault snapped: "This man is either Disraeli or Kerensky," and went off to pick mushrooms in the Versailles woods. Now that Mendès has ticked off half of his allotted time, other Frenchmen, sympathetic to his aims but doubtful of his chances, are asking questions. Is Mendès an innocent in all but economic matters, surrounded by inexperienced intellectuals united only by their dislike of inertia? Or is he a self-disciplined realist who expresses a French mood of grim resolution? Or is he Kerensky...