Word: mend
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Like a camel driver urging his beast to get up off its knees. French Premier Pierre Mendès-France cajoled and prodded the French National Assembly towards the decision it had balked at for years. Now both France's allies and France's enemies demanded that the issue of German rearmament be met, and Mendès promised that France would declare itself...
...Deputies were present. All Europe waited on their decision, yet there was little to be felt or seen of the profound sense of history that had reigned at the London Conference and shone in its decisions. A bored-looking, frock-coated usher placed the inevitable glass of milk at Mendès' right hand, and in a flat, disappointed voice, the Premier began to speak. Mendès was off form. His theme was essentially negative. Bidding for the support of EDC champions, he argued that enough of EDC's supranationality had been put into the Brussels Treaty...
...Mendès parliamentary strategy also required that he pick up votes from the Socialists (104 seats), whose left wing opposed EDC. To curry favor with them, he came ominously close to beggaring the very policy he was advocating. Mendès assured the Socialists that he would never have accepted the London agreement if there were any danger of its "straining our relations" with the Soviet Union. Besides, he said, "you know, and the Soviet Union knows well, that time is needed, two or three years without doubt, for the London decisions to result in arms for Germany...
Soul of a Soldier. But even this devious approach failed to swing the Assembly. From two directions at once, the opposition hit at Mendès and the London plan. On one side were Communists and Pacifists-mostly among the Socialists-who oppose all German rearmament, on the other, the "Europeans"-mainly of the Catholic M.R.P. As champions of EDC, the Europeans could not forgive the Premier who had presided. Pilate-like, over the death of EDC and who now pleaded for their support for a new European alliance, shorn of most of the safeguards that had distinguished...
Assembly on the Spot. All day and all night the grappling went on. Mendès took a nap on the cot in his office, then, tugging at his rumpled suit, returned to the floor to fight his way out of an old beartrap of French politics-the "war of resolutions." By attaching crippling resolutions to a government motion, the Assembly often evades a decision or makes futile a government proposition. Mendès found himself fighting more than a dozen of them. As a favor to the Europeans, he agreed to one that expressed a "desire to continue with...