Word: rostrum
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...small men, however parlous the time, the small men carry on, sometimes gamely. Last week France's durable Premier Joseph Laniel-whose government has lasted for almost seven months, longer than the average for the Fourth Republic-mounted the eight carpeted steps to the National Assembly's rostrum, put on gold-rimmed glasses and read a 45-minute speech. Purpose: to win a vote of confidence so that Laniel's government would stay alive and Laniel's Foreign Minister Georges Bidault could go to the Four-Power Conference in Berlin...
From the crescents of red plush seats, Deputy after Deputy went to the rostrum to speak the doubts of a nation too weak to defend itself, too proud to acknowledge its weakness even to itself, too fearful to heal it with an arrangement which permits Germany to rearm. As usual, the men on the extreme right, the Gaullists, and those on the extreme left, the Communists, rose in unequivocal opposition. But the bulk of France's parliament formed into a walking, talking tapestry of the confusion that threads through all France's social, religious and party lines...
Late on the fourth day of debate, he took the rostrum with a thick manuscript. Haltingly, fuzzily, he began to speak. "The question arises," said he. "whether German rearmament can really be avoided . . . The line of defense should be pushed as far to the east as possible. The defense of Europe . . . requires great depth. This depth can be obtained only by carrying the line of defense as far as is possible-that is to say, by including Germany...
...these signs, 74-year-old Mohammed Mossadegh, after 81 days in jail, was in his best fighting trim. As Premier, he had stood off the British Empire from his bedroom; lying languidly on his iron bed, he had dangled and defied coveys of U.S. diplomats; on the rostrum, shaking, sighing and crying, he had stirred street mobs to frenzy. Now he had taken his act to court...
Later in the week, the general followed the celebrity's path to the speaker's rostrum of the National Press Club in Washington. There he reminisced in jocular, earthy language about his captivity. His roughest time, he said, came when the Communists questioned him for grueling periods-once for 68 hours, then 44 hours and then ten hours-trying to get him to reveal the defense plans for Japan. After one session, as he lay sleepless and freezing on the mud floor of his hut, he resolved to kill himself...