Word: difficult
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Gaulle is no doubt a difficult man--stubborn, conceited, obsessed by a sense of his personal mission to restore France to greatness. His concept of political leadership smacks suspiciously of authoritarianism to many Frenchmen who hold zealous devotion to the ideals of individual liberty and the inherent virtue of la Republique as it stands. Such devotion, laudable as it may be in the abstract, is, however, sometimes blind to the practical requirements of government. France's present national crisis seems to be one of these occasions. De Gaulle, offering resolution to a country that has been plagued by political pusillanimity...
Hoadley called the recession "an interim" between the great boom that ended last summer and another great boom that he expects will begin in the early 1960s. "It is likely to be difficult," he said, "to come out of this very rapidly." His reasons: 1) the artificial backlog of pent-up postwar demand has been satisfied; 2) the population boom is over for at least five years because of the low Depression-years' birth rate; 3) expenditures for new plants and equipment are likely to continue downward because of the nation's already large productive capacity; 4) consumer...
...treaty-bound to NATO for the next eleven years. Washington remembers that De Gaulle once described NATO as "an American protectorate without even the benefit of efficient protection." Still suspicious of Germany, he is less of a European than France's recent Premiers. He would make France a difficult ally...
...second Washington and Whitehall thought, a difficult but stable government (if De Gaulle could bring it off) might contribute more to the defenses of the West than all the lip service paid to "Western unity" by all the weak Premiers of France in the past decade. It would be worth some dissension to have a French government capable of halting the steady diminution of Western prestige in Asia and Africa caused by the Algerian...
While everyone realizes that the economic good health of such nations is vital to the West, the way to achieve it is difficult. One suggestion is for a series of international "commodity agreements" to stabilize prices and production. But so far, the U.S. has shied away because such pacts would be little more than worldwide price-fixing cartels that would prove no more workable than the U.S. farm price-support program. Another idea is for the U.S. and other buyer nations to stockpile raw materials from underdeveloped nations. But since the U.S. already has full stockpiles of most commodities...