Word: langere
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...William Langer...
...vote by which the Senate passed the labor bill last week was a testimonial to Taft's conduct of that debate. Only three Republicans voted against it: Oregon's Wayne Morse, Nevada's George Malone, North Dakota's William Langer. Senator Ives, who had forced Taft into a liberalization of a number of measures, went along in the end. So did Joe Ball, who had fought for a sterner bill but was not too displeased over the outcome. The vote, if it held, would be enough to override a presidential veto...
Under the circumstances, Langer argues, the U.S. would have been foolish to withdraw in a high-minded huff merely out of distaste for Darlans and Lavals. Langer says that Vichy's North African governor, General Maxime Weygand, "was just as intent as we on excluding the Germans from North Africa and blocking any program of collaboration." Nine months before the U.S. went to war with Germany, the U.S. agreed to ship Weygand limited supplies of coal, sugar, tea, etc. In return, Weygand let U.S. vice consuls work with French Resistance leaders and report in cipher to Washington. In this...
...Rambunctious Man. Historian Langer finds little good to say of De Gaulle. He admits that De Gaulle represented resistance of a different and bolder sort than Vichy's, but argues that he had no proved following in French territory until later in the war. Langer also echoes opinions widely held in wartime Washington and London: De Gaulle too had his share of "semi-fascist political and social views"; he was "personally vain and ambitious, self-centered and almost impossible to deal with...
...then mistaken or makeshift, the U.S. Vichy policy on the whole was shrewd, sensible, unsentimental, says Langer. "Possibly if we had treated De Gaulle differently, if we had thrown ourselves behind his movement, the man himself might have become less rambunctious. . . . But this is all purely speculative. . . . In the popular mind it all reduced itself to the choice between the authoritarian regime of Vichy and the heroic crusade of De Gaulle. But unless one can demonstrate that De Gaulle and his movement could have contributed more effectively to American interests . . . the whole argument against our policy falls flat...