Word: mending
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...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...
...Mendès had hoped to win tentative Assembly approval without staking his premiership on the outcome, but the Assembly did not let him. Shortly before 1 a.m. on the second day of debate, the Premier, his voice thick with disgust, announced: "I must pose the question of confidence." That meant that the vote would be delayed until this week and if the Mendès government is beaten, the Cabinet would have to resign...
...Mendès-France was one Frenchman, at least, who seemed to realize that France's time for putting off things was near an end. "German rearmament has already been decided upon," he warned. "The only question is whether it will be with us or in spite...