Word: gaullists
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...friends, Gabriel Aranda, 33, a slight, bald onetime journalist and former government civil servant, is known as "the Archangel." But to France's ruling Gaullists, he is something else again. For a week Aranda flooded the press with photocopied letters and documents that made high-ranking Gaullist ministers. Deputies and party leaders look like influence peddlers for private interests. In the process, he became something of a public hero, and left the government of President Georges Pompidou in embarrassed disarray...
Aranda claims to have obtained 136 documents implicating 48 public officials. He leaked 15 of the papers which involved ten well-known Gaullist politicians, including Minister of Agriculture Jacques Chirac and the editor of the Gaullist party daily La Nation. One letter from former Gaullist Party Secretary-General Rene Tomasini asked "mon cher Albin" Chalandon, then Minister of Development and Housing, to give a private firm a fat contract for highway construction. Another disclosed that a Gaullist Deputy had forged a building permit for a supermarket by inserting it between the clipped-off letterhead and signature of Chalandon. Yet another...
...Disease. Gaullist reaction to the disclosures verged on hysteria. Prime Minister Pierre Messmer denounced Aranda for "acting against morality and against the law." Pompidou, in one of his semiannual press conferences last week, lamented that photocopying had become "a disease of our times" -though he promised to check carefully on the integrity of Gaullist candidates in next March's parliamentary elections...
...summit, and why Brandt could not change the French President's mind. Both men were forced to caution and inaction by political problems at home. Even as he talked with Brandt, Pompidou had made up his mind to sack Premier Jacques Chaban-Delmas, replacing him with Old Gaullist Pierre Messmer. Brandt, in turn, had in his pocket an angry five-page letter of resignation from the man who until recently had been the star of his Cabinet, Karl Schiller, the super-Minister who held both the Finance and Economics portfolios...
...feature in this scheme is that Pompidou would preside over the political affairs of Western Europe like a benevolent Gaullist godfather, holding the Community's lesser leaders firmly in line. Though French diplomats have explained the Pompidou plan with extraordinary reserve and caution, other European countries have been less reserved in rejecting it. "The French have always thought we should go to hell," said a Dutch official in The Hague, "and this is typical of their reasoning." Snapped a German diplomat: "It is absolutely absurd to think that one nation in the Community should be assigned to make shoe...