Word: pompidou
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...Palestinian Terrorist Abu Daoud. Other detractors simply charged that the computerized temple of glass and steel was too expensive (about $200 million). And so, amid all the scandale beloved of the Parisian art world, 3,500 notables were invited to gather this week for the opening of the Georges Pompidou National Center for Art and Culture...
Chirac has chewed his way through France's political structure at a frenzied pace. At 30, after graduation from France's elite civil service academy, L'Ecole Nationale d'Administration, he won a position on the staff of Georges Pompidou, then Charles de Gaulle's Premier. In the next decade he held five ministerial posts, and at 41 became the youngest Premier in the history of the Fifth Republic. Now, at 44, he has picked up the fallen banner-and lofty rhetoric-of le grand Charles himself...
...Pompidou fondly dubbed Chirac "my bulldozer." Chirac's time is spent on little but his work. He averages two weekends a month at his Correze chateau with his wife Bernadette and two daughters, Laurence, 18, and Claude, 15. He has no hobbies, plays no sport. Bristling with nervous energy, he can be brutal to his staff. He often startles visitors by leaping from behind his desk and pacing the office...
...almost no new equipment was installed. As late as 1962, the French Secretary of State for Posts and Telecommunications blithely dismissed the phone as a "gimmick." Charles de Gaulle would not even tolerate a telephone in his presidential office at the Elysée. His successor, Georges Pompidou, had a single phone on a side table but rarely used it; one of Pompidou's aides reportedly got only three calls from him in nine years...
...turn France into "an advanced liberal society." To some extent, he has delivered, with such modern trappings as liberal divorce, abortion (almost on demand) and the vote for 18-year-olds. He has also successfully softened the authoritarian style of his predecessors, wearing business suits when De Gaulle or Pompidou would have appeared in morning coats and sharing an occasional meal at the homes of ordinary French people. But the novelty of Giscard's consciously unimperial style has long since worn off, and he has lately had to deal with a realization that among most of his voters...