Word: diplomatic
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Even after reading it a few hours later, Bidault was only partly reassured. Said one French diplomat: "When you said Korea was outside your security line, the Communists attacked. What might they do if they believe you will not fight for Indo-China? We had felt that the U.S. was resolved to save as much as possible of Indo-China. Now how can we feel? Only that you will...
There have been times when it seemed that ambivalence was Georges Bidault's chief stock in trade. The quality is essential to political survival in France, helpful to a diplomat, but frequently maddening to those who must do business with him. Bidault speaks in images and parables, abhors the straight yes or no. A bureaucrat asks if he will accept a luncheon invitation. "If only I am hungry by then . . ." murmurs Bidault obliquely. The bureaucrat backs away, unsure whether the date is set or not. Bidault is apt to speak similarly of bigger issues-EDC, the Saar, Indo-China...
There have been many and varied answers, some old, some recent, some true, some wrong, some regretted. From an old U.S. China hand: "A sort of Chinese Talleyrand." From a fellow-traveling Indian diplomat: "A second Nehru!" From a onetime kingpin in the Chinese Communist movement: "A Chinese Molotov." Chiang Kai-shek is reported to have called him "a reasonable Communist." General George Marshall once spoke of him with "friendship and esteem" and thought him a man of his word...
...power struggle in the Kremlin. A onetime Menshevik, he came through unscathed when the Bolsheviks put the Mensheviks out of business in 1921. He not only rode out the great purges of the '30s but was the flamboyant and savage state prosecutor of their victims. He became a diplomat in 1940. Stalin's death brought him a reduction in rank (from Foreign Minister to his present post) but never stirred a hair of his snowy head...
...Eric Sevareid started in major-league fashion with diagrammed displays of what would happen to big cities of the U.S. if they were targets of the H-bomb, and followed with filmed quotes from Physicist Ralph Lapp ("Let's have the facts given to the public") and ex-Diplomat George Kennan. But anticlimax followed with a "human interest" look at baseball and a too-long digression into the progress of the Wisconsin movement to vote the recall of Senator McCarthy. Sevareid announced that "I expect to use some words here and there, for old times' sake...