Word: communistic
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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INTERVIEWS WITH 47 AGING ex-Communist Party members are sandwiched between Gornick's nostalgic memories of the Bronx and her subsequent experience as a radical feminist. Her childhood taught her that optimistic left-wing ideology could soothe the pain of voiceless poverty: "People sat down at the kitchen table to talk, Politics sat down with them, Ideas sat down with them, above all, History sat down with them." During her teens, she joined the Communist-affiliated Labor Youth League, but she recalls, "I had often been in a state of dismay as I felt the weight of simplistic socialist explanations...
...second stake was the role of the Communist Party (C.P.). It had been in a political ghetto since 1947. In order to come out of it, its strategy, for many years, has been the formation of a Popular Front with the Socialists and the small Left Radicals. The Common Program of 1972 marked the first success of this strategy. But it was signed, not by the old and decrepit Socialist Party of the Fourth Republic, but by a vigorous new Socialist Party taken over by a cunning politician, Francois Mitterrand...
...fanciful) project code-named "Uncle Remus," in which the U.S., Britain and West Germany are helping the white South African minority to retain political power with tactical nuclear weapons. To add injury to insult, Castle learns that the man who helped his wife escape from her country, a Communist agent and a close friend named Carson, has recently died in a South African prison, officially of pneumonia. (But understanding how Pretoria operates, Castle knows otherwise.) Castle may be cowardly, apolitical and jealous only of his own happiness, but this is finally too much...
...President's tentative "opening to the left" inevitably displeased Chirac, whose indefatigable, tub-thumping anti-Communist campaign had contributed mightily to the center-right coalition's victory in the election. He quickly claimed that his party's "essential role" in the campaign had now given the Gaullists "legitimate means" to carry out their platform, which stresses law and order and faster economic growth. Not to be outdone by Giscard's promises of social change, Chirac, who plans to run for the presidency when Giscard's term expires, asserted that France needs "profound reforms, not superficial...
...their part, the Communists were smug about the defeat of the leftist coalition. Indeed, their party's strength has remained stable (at about 21 % of the popular vote) for the past 20 years. Many observers thought Marchais had deliberately set out to sabotage the left's alliance rather than risk being dominated by the Socialists in a leftist government. Still, Marchais was hardly prepared to explain what his behind-the-scenes strategy had been. His brash postelection comment was, simply, "We are more than ever convinced that a union of the left is necessary." The party daily...