Word: mende
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...Mendès waited. He was content to have Bidault try to negotiate an end to the Indo-China war. Let the opponents of negotiations negotiate, he said, because they are tougher. But Mendès always insisted that Geneva was folly, that the only way to get peace was through direct negotiation with the Viet Minh. "Really, your policy is incomprehensible," he told Bidault. "You ask Mao to stop aid to Ho. Why should he make you this gift?" Mendès also suspected another motive behind Bidault's policy: Bidault's hope that the U.S. could...
...there remains the nettlesome, wearisome subject of EDC. Mendès-France insists that there has never been a majority for EDC in its present form in the Assembly, despite what U.S. diplomats report. But he thinks there is ,a majority for some kind of German rearmament. Perhaps it is the kind described in the current Parisian quip: "The French want a German army bigger than Russia's [175 divisions] but smaller than France's [18 divisions...
...Mendès' solution for the problem is to turn it over to two of his Cabinet members, one ardently for EDC (Radical Maurice Bourgés-Maunoury) and the other (Defense Minister Pierre Koenig, a Gaullist) with a strong aversion for putting French soldiers under any supranational authority. He told them to work something...
...Gallic compromise: ratify the EDC treaty, but with two reservations in added protocols-that "unanimity of vote" should be required for the first five years (thus giving France a veto on any action it dislikes) and an escape clause allowing France to get out after ten years. At least Mendès is the first French Premier to set a deadline on submitting the EDC proposals to the Assembly for a yes or no vote...
Unanswered Questions. French partisans of EDC mistrust Mendès. Last week Bidault snapped: "This man is either Disraeli or Kerensky," and went off to pick mushrooms in the Versailles woods. Now that Mendès has ticked off half of his allotted time, other Frenchmen, sympathetic to his aims but doubtful of his chances, are asking questions. Is Mendès an innocent in all but economic matters, surrounded by inexperienced intellectuals united only by their dislike of inertia? Or is he a self-disciplined realist who expresses a French mood of grim resolution? Or is he Kerensky...