Word: tito
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...Author Fitzroy Maclean, prewar member of the British diplomatic service (Paris, Moscow), is a Conservative M.P. who parachuted into Yugoslavia during the war, commanded the British military mission at Tito's headquarters. He clearly grew to like Tito as a man, while disliking nearly everything the man symbolizes. Maclean quotes the old Balkan adage-"Behind every hero stands a traitor"-in an attempt to explain the ambiguities of the Croatian farm boy who managed to outwit and outfight the Nazis, defy his allies of both East and West, survive the deadly infighting in his own Yugoslav Communist Party...
...highly successful survivor in a political system where the only real treason is to be slower on the draw than the other fellow, the only real heresy to be out of step with the twistings of "historical necessity." Author Maclean traces the fairly familiar but still remarkable facts of Tito's life from his birth (1892) in a tiny Croatian village to his World War I years as a prisoner in Russia and his fighting alongside the Bolsheviks during the Russian civil war. The story continues with Tito's years (1928-34) in the jails of what...
...Adversaries. Tito grows through the book from an awkward villager to a smooth party functionary to a puffed-up dictator wearing the most splendid uniforms since Göring. He alternately appears a shrewd peasant, a cold-eyed killer, a sentimental family man. There is rough humor as well as ruthlessness in him, courage but little real rashness, some pity but no compassion. His friends and enemies were men of great complexity. There was Milovan Djilas, the Montenegrin partisan who seemed determined to infuse some humanity into the Communist machine and today, from jail, is one of its more eloquent...
...Tito is still riding the wind that has swept away other men and regimes. What makes him significant is the meeting of two great forces-Communism and nationalism-that Tito managed instinctively to play off against each other. When he needed strength for his rebellion against Moscow, the man with peasant roots and romantic flair could draw on his people's patriotism; when he needed strength to subdue his own turbulent people, the practiced conspirator and Marxist dialectician could draw on Moscow police methods. If more of the world could understand the brutality of this ideological alliance-which persists...
Author Maclean finds Tito at 65 "as alert, as decisive and as hardheaded as ever and as ready as ever to face resolutely, realistically and ruthlessly any situation that may confront him." But Maclean makes no final estimate of Tito's place in history, and even Tito himself shows a certain hesitancy. "Remember," he says, "there may be more to come...