Word: pompons
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...roly-poly extravert who looks as though he had never given up his youthful job as a pâtissier. Although he serves as the party's chief propagandist, Duclos wisely concentrated on giving Communism a friendly face and good one-liners-including the name of his dog, Pompon, after his favorite political opponent. Asked why his party disavowed the militant New Left, whom Frenchmen have nicknamed Gauchos, Duclos replied: "Gauchos, but they're American!" He seldom lost the chance to rumble mechanically against inhuman labor laws and big banks, but he performed best on the personal level...
Georges Jean Raymond Pompidou seemed born for that assignment. He was the son of country school teachers in the poor Auvergne town of Montboudif, a name, like his own, that used to evoke howls of laughter from school friends because of its sound. To "Pompon," as the French affectionately call him, it has proved no liability. Indeed, he can turn on the peasant touch at the whiff of a Gauloise, and uses it to great effectiveness campaigning. Pompidou blazed through his studies, graduating first in his class from the prestigious École Normale Supérieure in 1934. While his classmates...
...acting like an intriguing Medici. Pompidou, who made the announcement over drinks with newsmen at the French embassy, insisted that he had spoken only out of gallantry. A lady had asked the question, he said; had a man asked, he would have been more brusque. Returning to Paris, Pompon, as Frenchmen have nicknamed him, toned down his Roman remarks. "Thank heavens," he told newsmen, "General de Gaulle is thoroughly in the saddle...
...Lille the benign Pompon finally took charge. He urged the U.N.R. to open itself up to all those "who are in agreement with us about the direction of the future." The delegates, many of them owing their jobs and appointments to Pompidou decided little beyond changing the U.N.R.'s name to the "Union of Democrats for the Fifth Republic" (De Gaulle had forbidden the use of his name "even in adjectival form" in any party title). As to the direction of the future, Pompidou and the other speakers left that vague, no doubt for fear of infringing...
...onetime professor of literature and investment banker whom De Gaulle thrust untutored into French politics as his premier in 1962. The only man in his Cabinet that the general deigns to call by his first name (everyone else, both friend and foe, refers to the premier as "Pompon"), the bushy-browed Pompidou has long been De Gaulle's unspoken choice to succeed him. De Gaulle would never, of course, detract from his own image as France's absolute ruler by openly endorsing Pompidou. But in his press conference he came as close as he ever has to anointing...