Word: mend
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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When he rose to deliver his accounting, Mendès got a one-minute ovation-very warm from the Communist left, warm from the Gaullist right, scattered or nonexistent from the moderate center, where ex-Foreign Minister Georges Bidault cocked his head towards a wall and elaborately did nothing. Palais Bourbon's tiny shelflike visitors' boxes were crowded; most of the diplomatic corps was there...
...Mendès was crisp and matter of fact, like a company president notifying stockholders of a sad liquidation of property. "Within a few days," he began, "blood will cease to flow, and we will no longer see our youth decimated over there. This is the end of a nightmare...
...have no illusions, and I want no one else to have illusions, about the terms of the cease-fire agreement. The terms are sometimes cruel because they consecrate facts which are cruel." Geneva, argued Mendès, reflected "losses already suffered or rendered inevitable by the military situation." But Mendès then went on to claim that Geneva would permit France to retain its "presence" in the Far East, even that Geneva had improved relations between France, Britain and the U.S. The Assemblymen clapped hands when Mendès mentioned his good friend Anthony Eden; for the name Foster...
...snapped Mendès in his best deadline style, "what will be done tomorrow?" South Viet Nam would get its independence, with French "technical assistance"; the French army would remain in South Viet Nam if the Vietnamese wanted it. That was all. There was more applause...
...Mendès' critics seemed less perturbed by Geneva itself than by their fear that Mendes might get too much of the credit. Only Georges Bidault dared to compare Geneva to Munich; he drew only skimpy applause from his own Roman Catholic M.R.P. Party, and short shrift from Mendès. By a thundering vote, of 462 to 13, with 152 absent or abstaining (the latter mostly from Bidault's M.R.P.), the Assembly hailed "the cessation of hostilities in Indo-China, due in large measure to the decisive action of the Premier...