Word: spaak
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...unpopular largely because of television. People see the horrors and the misery of this war-burning villages, weeping mothers, maimed children. They see South Vietnamese troops manhandling Viet Cong suspects, and they see the more sordid aspects of Saigon night life." Belgium's Paul-Henri Spaak put it more succinctly. "The U.S.," he said, "has completely lost the information war in Viet...
...Socialist, he was a pacifist. But he was also tough. When the Germans invaded Belgium in 1940, the German ambassador called on Foreign Minister Spaak to read a statement from Hitler. The German never got a chance to speak. "My turn first, Mr. Ambassador," said Spaak, before he threw the German out. Escaping from the Wehrmacht, Spaak spent the war in London as Foreign Minister of the Belgian government-in-exile...
...convinced that the future belongs to the great human communities," he once said. "Europe is one of these communities." To try to make it so, Spaak made his weight felt in every major international endeavor since World War II. He helped write the United Nations Charter in 1945 and was the first president of the U.N. General Assembly. He presided over the Council of Europe, headed the final negotiations that led to the European Common Market. And, for all his pacifism, he was secretary-general of NATO from...
...great was his distrust of Russia's postwar ambitions that in 1948 he bluntly told Andrei Vishinsky that Belgium's foreign policy was based on fear: "Fear of you, fear of your government, fear of your policy." NATO, he decided, was Western Europe's only chance. Spaak saw the Atlantic Alliance as much more than military: "NATO must also be the political center of the West. It serves no purpose to make a purely military alliance if we have not learned to live together in peace...
...Spaak's dream of a true European community has not come true. But Mr. Europe has not given up hope yet. He plans to leave Belgium and install himself on the Côte d'Azur, where he can pamper his painful gout and at the same time finish his memoirs. "Luxury, today, is solitude and silence," he said last week. To which the Brussels news paper La Libre Belgique had a typically Spaakian reply. "Solitude, maybe," said the paper. "But silence? We doubt...