Word: nehru
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...know, like and respect each other. They first met in 1949 when Ike, as president of Columbia University, awarded an honorary degree to Nehru, who was making his first visit to the U.S. After Eisenhower moved on to the presidency of the U.S., Nehru's private comments about him were not always flattering. Though recognizing Ike's inherent goodness, Nehru nevertheless thought him a weak leader, dominated by the "negative" foreign policy of John Foster Dulles...
They became better acquainted in 1956 on Nehru's second trip to the U.S., soon after Hungary and Suez had erupted into the headlines. Spending a day at Ike's Gettysburg farm, the two began talking at breakfast, continued through the morning until lunch. Then after a short nap, the talks went on through the late afternoon, dinner and evening-a total of 14 hours. It was, said Nehru, the longest sustained conversation he has ever had with anyone, and it touched on subjects ranging from the painting of Grandma Moses to the personality of Nikita Khrushchev...
Flat & Stale. Nehru as a man is as contradictory as India as a nation. Still slender, handsome and energetic at 70, he looks taller than his 5 ft. 8 in., works 17 hours a day year in and year out, and has had only a six-week vacation from his job since 1947. Personally fastidious, from the fresh rosebud in his buttonhole each morning to the silken handkerchief tucked into his right sleeve, he is most at home with India's teeming, untidy millions. An agnostic who "is not interested in religion," he is leader...
...Under Nehru, India has had generally sound government, a stable currency and a working democracy through its years of independence. The press is free, the restraints of free speech and assembly are minimal. Forty million Indians attend school and college, and the number is to be doubled in five years. If any one man can claim the credit, it is Nehru, and all Indians know it. Scarcely anyone now remembers the 1947 warning of Sir Winston Churchill that "we are turning over India to men of straw, like the caste Hindu, Mr, Nehru, of whom, in a few years...
Churchill was wrong, and Nehru remains today what he was twelve years ago: the biggest man in India. But at a considerable cost to the nation and himself. Last year Nehru told newsmen that he was feeling "flat and stale," and wanted to retire as Prime Minister. He was ravaged by the ceaseless struggle to get things done in the timeless, bottomless morass of India. Food production is still at the mercy of the nation's cycles of flood and drought. Huge, multipurpose economic projects start out magnificently and then gradually fall farther and farther behind schedule. The second...