Word: mends
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Both as politician and social animal, Mendès was a lonely man in these years. "There's a certain interior coldness about him," admitted one of his few close friends. His austerity was somehow impressive in itself. He does not smoke, dance or gorge. "He's a great believer in the American drugstore," said a friend, "because he can eat a little and quickly." In Paris, he is rarely invited to theater premieres or fashionable salons. "Getting choice invitations requires work," says one Parisian hostess. "Pierre doesn't go around complimenting people. He just doesn...
Within Thirteen Votes. In June 1953, President Vincent Auriol asked Mendès to try to form France's 18th postwar government. At first he refused; he was not ready. Then characteristically he concluded: "After criticizing the government as I have done, the people would not understand if I refused myself...
...diners du travail. Jacques Soustelle, De Gaulle's bright young lieutenant, came, so did young MRPers of Bidault's party like André Monteil and Robert Buron, and Socialists like Robert Lacoste and Gaston Defferre. Says Servan-Schreiber: "First, we had to get a sounding board for Mendès. With his isolation in Parliament, he made brilliant speeches but there was no political echo. Secondly, he had always worked alone. He didn't know how to work in a team...
...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...