Word: mend
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Congratulations on your article [July 12] on France's Premier Pierre Mend èes-France . . . Whether he succeeds or fails in his attempt to find a solution to France's many problems, he will be remembered . . . as the only Premier of France since the war who had the nerve to tell his people exactly what was wrong with their country...
...Americans did not like the idea of the [July 20] deadline, and considered that it put Mendès-France in a weak position, you might as well know that the French people did like the idea of such a deadline, because that was something entirely new in our rotten politics. Our previous unimaginative statesmen did not 'know anything better than stalling. The risk taken by P. M.F. worked like a fresh wind in a dead man's house...
Chou En-lai of Peking moved through Europe with the relaxed grace of a conqueror. He savored pâté de foie gras and raspberries with Mendès-France; he sipped wine with three Chinese actresses and an Occidental jester, Charlie Chaplin...
Like a great khan bestowing gold upon some worthy vassal, Chou gave Mendès a few pieces of Chinese silk, some Chinese folk stories, richly engraved. And at Geneva's final session, the Premier of Red China took it upon himself to praise "the fine conciliatory spirit" of Mendès-France, the "praiseworthy efforts" of Molotov and Anthony Eden. "Undoubtedly," said Chou the Conqueror, "the success of this conference is tremendous...
...comparison between Munich and Geneva, so widely made last week, was also widely resented by those who argued that Eden and Mendès-France had only done what had to be done in the face of defeat on the battlefield. Asked about Munich, the U.S.'s Bedell Smith snapped: "A damned poor term. At Munich things were given away when there was no fighting. This is a war." The real test of the comparison would be whether Eden had learned a new urgency or been lured into a new complacency...