Word: poher
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...preferences for De Gaulle's successor, candidates and voters paid close attention. As expected, Gaullist ex-Premier Georges Pompidou led the field, the choice of 42% of those queried. What was surprising was that close behind him, with a hefty 35% of the vote, came Interim President Alain Poher. The showing made the still undeclared Poher a serious candidate who could conceivably outdistance Pompidou in the election set for June 1 - or certainly force him into a runoff. Frenchmen asked to choose only between the two favorites were almost evenly divided: Pompidou got 50.5% of the vote, Poher...
...Next, Poher asked Interior Minister Raymond Marcellin to reduce the number of policemen blanketing Paris on riot standby. He thought that they were a partisan element as well, tending to give credence to De Gaulle's oft-proclaimed prophecy that after his departure chaos would ensue. Then he dismissed Gaullist Jacques Foccart as Secretary-General for African Affairs. Knowledgeable Frenchmen were delighted: Foccart's African designation was in fact a façade for his job as boss of the Gaullist "Barbouzes," a thuggish lot of secret police and informers...
Understandably, Poher's first Cabinet meeting with the Gaullist government was, said a Minister, "glacial." Poher's aides gaily replied that if the Ministers had found the meeting frosty, Poher had warmly enjoyed himself. The interim President was not amused, however, when a few hours later news agencies carried the remarks of Foreign Minister Michel Debré made at the meeting, that "France suffered a defeat last Sunday." Poher's office issued a sharp rebuke, noting that Ministers were not authorized to disclose the Cabinet's secret deliberations...
...Poher was largely unknown to Frenchmen before the referendum battles, in spite of a 25-year public career. The son of a successful civil engineer, he won degrees in engineering, law and political science, became a protégé of Robert Schuman and served at sub-Cabinet level in several Fourth Republic governments before entering the Senate. Schuman converted him into a European unionist. Poher worked with the European Coal and Steel Community, later became a member of the European Parliament at Strasbourg. Last October he was elected Senate President, succeeding its longtime leader Gaston Monnerville, who had resigned...
...Poher soon joined the opposition, too. On April 17, his 60th birthday, he announced on a national television program that he rejected De Gaulle's propositions. After that, Poher crisscrossed France by auto, train and plane to argue against them in person. His home-folks approach on the hustings led newsmen to call him a French Harry Truman; it also helped to galvanize middle-class discontent into a decisive "no" vote. "Because one man resigns," Poher insisted in town after town, "France will not be consumed by chaos." He has been suggested as a centrist candidate for President because...