Word: debre
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Flying into London last week for a 36-hour visit with Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, French Premier Michel Debré had one clear purpose: to take a peek up Britain's sleeve and see what, if any, further undeclared cards the "flexible" British were planning to slip onto the table in the forthcoming East-West negotiations. In the process, Debré gave the rest of the Western alliance its first good look...
Little known to his countrymen, 47-year-old Michel Debré is even less well known abroad-and what Western statesmen did know of him was scarcely calculated to delight them. Short, stocky and black-haired, Debré has the face of an irascible chipmunk, and in the past has often sounded like one. A brilliant lawyer and civil servant before World War II, an organizer of the Gaullist Resistance during the war, Debré after the war became known in the French Senate for his scathing attacks on the leaders of the Fourth Republic, his nationalistic outbursts against European...
...London he proved more soft-spoken and diplomatic than the British had expected. In his university days he had been a passionate student of British history. Gazing last week at the portraits of every British Prime Minister since Sir Robert Walpole, which decorate the staircase of 10 Downing Street, Debré mused aloud: "Just imagine how long a staircase it would take in the Hôtel de Matignon to hang a portrait of every Prime Minister France has had in the same period...
...royal audience that France has seen since the days of Napoleon III. While the Cabinet of the Fifth Republic sat in dutiful silence at the foot of his dais, De Gaulle announced that he himself would speak for France at the prospective summit meeting-though, naturally, "with Premier Michel Debré at my side." With the disdain of a prince for a parvenu, he shot a derisive shaft at Khrushchev, "whom I met not so very long ago in Moscow in Stalin's entourage and who has come some distance since...
...transfer of the Sixth Fleet during the Quemoy crisis-NATO had not been too scrupulously notified. What mattered this time was that De Gaulle was not pleading a necessity, but intending a rebuff. His ministers were almost apologetic in having to deliver it to allies. (Even ultranationalist Premier Michel Debré privately argued against De Gaulle's action.) De Gaulle was plainly 1) miffed at U.S. abstention during the last U.N. vote on the Algerian revolt, 2) determined to be admitted, along with Britain, as a senior partner in the Western alliance...