Word: spaak
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...school, Paul-Henri was erratically brilliant. Once, when he flunked an exam, he forestalled punishment by declaring: "I have already administered to myself the full flow of reproach which a boy in my situation usually gets from Papa and Maman" Spaak's culture is essentially French, and his early heroes were French. He was particularly keen on Napoleon until, in his own words, he "became aware that it was compromising for a politician to admire Napoleon too much...
...crowd of Socialist partisans in a raid against Brussels' conservative Nation Belge and with his own walking stick smashed one of the paper's windows. The Nation Bege protected the window with an iron screen (which is still in place and known as the "Spaak grille"). But Belgians found it a little hard to take seriously a young radical who carried a walking stick. They called him "the Bolshevik in the dinner jacket...
...Play a Bad Card . . ." "I felt I had something to do in politics," says Spaak of this period, "but all the doors were closed." In 1935, a door opened. Premier Paul van Zeeland asked him to enter the Cabinet as Minister of Transport, Posts & Telegraphs. Spaak accepted. Then, excitedly, he telephoned his mother: "Maman, if your telephone breaks down, complain directly to me. I'm the new Communications Minister." The next year he became Foreign Minister...
...search for a form of security for Belgium, Spaak turned to the narrow solution of neutrality. It was perhaps the least sensible thing he ever did. He obtained from Germany, France and Britain promises that the Belgian frontiers would not be violated. He hoped that Belgium could be another Switzerland...
...learned his mistake. When Hitler's ambassador, Vicco Karl von Bülow-Schwante, arrived to announce the invasion on the morning of May 10, Spaak shut him off: "No, you are not going to read this to me. I know what it is ... I am the one who is going to speak, and what I have to say is-get the hell out of here." Spaak went to France when his country fell, escaped through Spain to London, after hiding from Franco's police in the bottom of an orange-laden truck...