Word: simon
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...role of honest broker between Germany, France and Russia in the proposed Eastern Locarno Peace effort (TIME, Feb. 18), His Majesty's Government found this week that they must take whatever initiative had to be taken in retort to Adolf Hitler. Visibly perturbed, Foreign Secretary Sir John Simon rushed to London from a holiday in South Wales...
Lawyerish Sir John Simon perhaps cannot believe that anyone would tear up a deck of cards. His nature is to assume that the game must go on and, being a game, must go on according to the rules. To their Embassy in Berlin the imperturbable British sent instructions to ask the German Government whether Adolf Hitler's invitation to Sir John Simon still stood; whether, assuming that it stood, the German Government remained anxious to obtain by bargain what they had purported to seize; whether, in effect, the Nazis are mad dogs or gentlemanly players of a gentleman...
Quick, however, was the Wilhelmstrasse's public reply that it did indeed expect Sir John Simon to make his visit. In London Sir John announced he would go. At this the French felt decidedly let down, since they had concluded from recent conversations that they would be consulted in such situations-and at the first important one had not. Paris learned of the British note and Sir John's decision only after the fact. But, most important to both onetime allies, Herr Hitler had neatly cut the ground from under their feet. All that Britain's Foreign...
...neatly in their places are the unruffled, uninsultable civil servants of the British Foreign Office. They knew exactly how to cure Herr Hitler's cold, and it never occurred to them to return crude blow for blow. In the House of Commons a quiet remark by Sir John Simon that Hitler was "suffering from the cold he caught in the Saar," evoked hearty English mirth, painful when reported to inferiority-complexed Nazis. Next Sir John let it be known that Etonianly elegant Lord Privy Seal Anthony Eden would pass Berlin by en route to confer with the Government...
...Berlin Adolf Hitler's cold began to look like no stroke of genius at all. Soon German Foreign Minister Baron Constantin von Neurath was explaining to British Ambassador Sir Eric Phipps that in ten days Adolf Hitler would be delighted to receive Sir John Simon, would surely have no cold. As an odd Hitler gesture of appeasement, the Realmleader promised to prepare for Sir John's visit by the ritual of several days of meditation among the Bavarian Alps "breathing their pure, inspiring German...