Word: mend
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Future. "A stage has been attained," concluded Mendes. "Now other stages present themselves." Mendès planned more deadlines. Within the next seven days he would demand "full powers" to make over France's backward economy. Within 14 days he expected to improve French relations with the embittered North African nationalists. His dynamism was unquestioned, and it had gained him the most notable French popularity since postliberation De Gaulle. Yet the cruel fact of this dynamism was that it had forced through an agreement that consecrated the delivery of 12 million Vietnamese to Communism, and that crippled...
...there much evidence that Mendès intended to exert his dynamism to press really hard for EDC; he remained vulnerable, in the deathly climate of Geneva, to Communist pressure against the No. 1 objective of U.S. cold war strategy: the rearmament of Germany. "In Mendès-France's office in the Quai d'Orsay," cabled TIME correspondent André Laguerre, "I could hear the worn old cry: 'We must do nothing brutal to provoke the Communists...
...Mendès is honest. He commands respect and admiration, and no objective review of his performance can avoid that conclusion. He inherited a situation which had already been rendered disastrous by the inability of France to defend Indo-China, and in that desperate situation, the Geneva agreement is not entirely...
...time when a great many people-including influential Americans-are becoming almost emotionally 'for' him, it is important to recognize the Mendès-France anomaly: he combines an extraordinary lucid view of France's capabilities and responsibilities with a refusal to deny the naïve conviction of most West Europeans that Communists are basically ordinary people with whom, if you try hard enough, you can always do constructive business...
Despite the fine promises of Pierre Mendès-France, Diem was also half strangled by the albatross of French colonialism: if he asked the French army to withdraw, it would take about 80% of Viet Nam's military equipment in its train; if he asked the French army to stay, the Communists might easily convince the Vietnamese that Diem's new independence was a myth...