Meeting Mendes-France:

...Even these fleeting images fit cleanly into the mosaic of Mendes-France's past...

...The five days the French Premier spent in Washington and New York gave Americans a chance to utilize all three perspectives...

...For the most part, he has been running a government "of the Left" with aides of the Center and Right...

...Once he has decided on a measure, he continues to press it no matter how many obstacles intervene...

...Perhaps they will succeed, even in the next few months, and perhaps they will be right in doing so, though France can never go back to the days of Pinay and Laniel...

...When he knew last June that the Communists would support his investiture on the grounds of his truce promise, he stuck to the promise but repudiated the Communist votes...

...This type of experience, unique for a West European politician, helps explain the singular political style of Mendes-France...

...I met the Premier at an informal reception there...

...it served not to define but to blur the man...

...Delivering his prepared address in generally excellent English, Mendes-France seemed determined to make every syllable intelligible...

...It is as important to construct good housing in adequate quantity--and quickly--as it is to equip armored divisions...

...To give workers the certainty that their wages will increase as their productivity increases is to strike the sword from the hands of the Communists...

...We should, therefore, appreciate what has been accomplished and what can be accomplished--but not to the extent of becoming true believers in a world filled with pitfalls for the vainglorious...

...Regardless of how it may have appeared to Americans, to the common European 1942 was closer in tone to 1792 than to 1922...

...One heard that his economic medicine was too drastic for France, and that it was little better than that of the unlamented Joseph Laniel...

...in America, he personally supervised every detail of his visit, while at the same time voraciously studying the Paris newspapers which were flown specially to him...

...in a New York speech, he devoted another long, strong paragraph to it...

...Here the dominant note was of a top-flight welterweight--nimble, alert, vigorous, trim...

...now that he is touching their own vital interests...

...Yet, even these could not fully reveal the complex, multi-planed individual who has become the most provocative man in postwar Europe...

...Obviously, we will hear of it again...

...In jail, he spent all his time on two projects: preparing a legal brief on the injustice of his detention, and devising a plan for escape...

...And he will be back...

...Press accounts (and the gossip of visiting firemen) had successively compared this 47-year-old lawyer and economist to Clemenceau, Blum, Roosevelt, Molotov and Bonaparte...

...Though he had been holding conferences, making speeches and shaking hands for five straight days, he seemed limber and genial...

...One out of every two Frenchmen alive today lost a close relative in either the First or Second World War, or was himself wounded, or had his home destroyed...

...you, brother, even more than I." After several minutes, a Consulate official called the Premier's attention to the waiting guests, and Oatis moved quietly away, his young face drawn and solemn and somehow comforted...

...At this luncheon, as well as in previous addresses at the UN Assembly and the National Press Club, Mendes-France spoke as a man who knew that the questions of the day were difficult, forbidding, perhaps impossible of solution, but who, having faced these questions impersonally, felt compelled to pit the force of his being against them...

...although Mendes-France's back-stairs maneuvering was not of a high moral tone, the broad policy he finally executed conformed precisely to his original views...

...he seemed to be saying, can bring us final absolution, but everything we have done and will do that is right can reduce the incredible damnation of this earth...

...The distortions became clear to me when I watched Mendes-France address 1,600 prominent Americans at a luncheon sponsored by the Foreign Policy Association...

...he negotiated personally at Geneva, London and Paris, and flew to Tunis to present his proposals on autonomy directly to the Bey...

...When, through the good offices of Roger Vaurs of the French Consulate...

...The optimistic pieties of the early Fourth Republic moved him little...

...He nearly overthrew the London Conference by demanding a plan for mutual control of arms production and distribution when everything else seemed decided...

...His visit to the United States revealed the French Premier to be a highly complicated individual who is very much his own man Meeting Mendes-France By Anatole Shub MEETING Pierre Mendes-France is as different from watching him in public as watching him is from reading about him...

...Before he came to power, he approved of Atlantic unity as organized in NATO, favored a gradual progress to European unity in general, but tended to be skeptical of EDC without Britain and with France weak...

...At 30 a rising lawyer amid the smug, safe institutions of the Third Republic, at 35 he could credit his survival from the wreckage to the force of his own ingenuity...

...To have reached our present state of intimate cooperation with our former enemies less than a decade after the most horrible conflict in history is an achievement in which all freedom-loving Europeans can take deep pride...

...Each, of course, had different things to tell him, and he somehow managed to handle each one individually...

...He succeeded in the latter in June 1941, lived in hiding in Grenoble for a while, and finally managed to reach London in February 1942...

...Although the Radical party to which he belongs participated in many cabinets in the eight years after Liberation, Mendes-France stood aloof, waiting for the times to call him...

...He declared for an Indo-Chinese truce in 1953, and said that a truce a year later (in his view inevitable) would be much harsher...

...He has a deep admiration for Sir Winston Churchill, but he could no more summon the Edwardian serenity of Churchill than he could the Fitzgeraldian buoyancy of Adlai Stevenson...

...Mendes-France, the son of a Paris critic, entered school during World War I, was 22 at the start of the Great Depression, 31 at Munich, barely 40 when the cold war began...

...This was the headline-minded stuff of mythology and demonology...

...The same confidence was apparent in his walk, his movements, and his treatment of aides, newsmen and well-wishers...

...One caught the image, depending on one's point of view at the time, either of a tough young reformer sweeping away apathy and convention by force of will, or of a subtle, furtive master of Realpolitik, sacrificing men and honor to the service of his mysterious ambition...

...He is kindly and tolerant toward his aides, but obviously considers none of them indispensable, Cabinet ministers no more than Embassy secretaries...

...Party lines mean nothing to him...

...So much for the public figure: the man face to face is another story...

...He returned to France at the time of the Nazi invasion to oppose capitulation, but was arrested and imprisoned in Lyons for a year...

...He is a firm exponent of personal government, a dangerous game at best...

...When they did, after Dienbienphu, he came to power on his own terms...

...To most of us, Mendes-France had extended a hand, smiled, chatted amiably...

...Like the members of the "apathetic" postwar generation here and elsewhere, he confronts a world which he never made and which he has little reason to exalt...

...After each person on the quick-moving reception line passed, he was instantly ready for the next...

...They should no longer be reluctant to take him at his word...

...He has been very much his own man ever since April 1945, when he quit General de Gaulle's government in protest against its stand-pat economics...

...I think Walter Lippmann provided the key insight when he said that Mendes-France's ascent to power marked the first triumph of the postwar generation...

...Its essential elements, I believe, are a basic disbelief in the ability of the so-called "ruling circles" to rule successfully without truly national participation, and a fundamental conviction of his own superior ability to discern the inchoate wishes of the nation at large...

...Unable to receive consideration for the plan at London, he consented to have it sidetracked to a study commission which would meet January 17...

...Paris correspondents report, they are awaiting a chance to unseat him...

...Mendes-France's postwar career reflects this experience...

...more often than not, he remembered what they had said the first time...

...one heard that he was secretly working with the Communists...

...Edward R. Murrow has been described as a man "who always looks as if he has heard the worst but won't speak about it": Mendes-France appears to be a man who knows the worst and is determined to speak about it at every opportunity...

...When Oatis was introduced (by name only, with no hint of his Prague experience), the Premier moved forward, his face wreathed in sympathy, and drew Oatis to him with both hands...

...The announcement of the "Navarre Plan" to win the Indo-Chinese War failed to change his view that France could not win it alone...

...But those who have watched Mendes-France and talked with him are sure of two things: It will take quite a fight to bring him down...

...I could not hear what they were saying, these two former prisoners of totalitarianism, but Mendes-France's face told all...

...During his brief career in public life, he has witnessed one grandiloquent adventure into unreality after another: the Popular Front, "peace in our time," the Maginot Line, Vichy and the Resistance, the Grand Alliance, "collective security through the UN...

...There was no real strength, he said, in a pact which divided a nation...

...I received strikingly different impressions...

...When young people cannot hope to find living quarters in which they can lead a normal life and raise a family, how can they help despairing of the country in which they live...

...Like a receiver in bankruptcy, a politician who achieves power in this way tends to be contemptuous of both the previous administrative methods and administrators of the estate...

...Old and new foes among industrialists, union leaders, colonials and anti-colonials have sat quietly while he attacked the unpopular problems previous governments should have faced but didn't...

...And now that Mendes-France has pacified the critics of France abroad and is free to turn to his chef d'oeuvre, the domestic opposition to him has come out in the open...

...When the war broke out less than a year after Daladier's trip to Munich, Mendes-France was mobilized as a French Air Force lieutenant in Syria...

...The party which is bitterest against him is Georges Bidault's MRP, the Catholic party which authored EDC...

...Quite probably, the decisive years in Mendes-France's life were those between 1939 and 1943...

...Pro- and anti-EDC men moved in and out of his Cabinet with the shifting exigencies of the moment...

...Nothing we have done or will do...

...Before coming to America, he moved simultaneously to mollify both de Gaulle and the Socialists, while permitting an old opponent to retain the chairmanship of the Radicals...

...His government recognizes pro-Communist and anti-Communist unions...

...He is exceedingly public-relations conscious...

...When he helped kill EDC after brief efforts to make it more palatable to its Parliamentary opponents, its supporters were surprised and horrified...

...When he thereupon concluded the London and Paris agreements, which will be easily ratified by the Assembly, the EDC men were partially assuaged--but again surprised...

...His words are sparse, prosaic and earth-bound, his manner doggedly flat...

...The rest of them," it seemed to say, "are sweet, pleasant people, but they do not know...

...His weekly "fireside chats" and numerous speeches in the hinterlands are only part of a many-sided effort to reach the people over the heads of the parliamentarians...

...One heard that his reforms would cut the French Communist vote in half...

...When he came to power to liquidate the Indo-China War, he was the darling of the neutralist Le Monde, while the anti-Communist, pro-American Figaro was supercritical...

...Since the Paris agreement, Figaro has become increasingly friendly, while Le Monde has begun to attack him...

...It is not wise to force the creation of institutions at a pace far exceeding the development of grass-roots support...

...Mendes-France shows this in several ways: With the scrupulousness of the accountant, he insists on literal, specific definition of terms...

...To all who met him, he was at the very least gracious and interested: to some, like William Oalis of the Associated Press, who had spent two years in a Czech prison, he was a good deal more...

...they reminded him too much of the Third...

...When a big job must be done, he does it himself...

...The pretentious world of parties and platforms of the 1930s had given way with a single push to the shadowy demi-monde of Laval and the Maquis, where each man chose his own bitter fate and the means of the political man were often those of the common soldier or convict...

...yet at the same time he has been warmly applauded by France's foremost Catholic writer, Francois Mauriac...

...Neither what he said ("The European policy of France is the policy of a united Europe") nor the way that he said it jibed with previous second-hand impressions...

...The irony of Mendes-France's government is that it has devoted most of its time to what it considers secondary concerns...

...There he rejoined the Free French Air Force as a captain in the bomber group "Lorraine...

...But in praising the results of London and Paris, he continued to refer to his warm interest in the plan...

...Yet, despite these sentiments, his Finance Minister is Edgar Faure, who also served Laniel, and the task of reform has hardly begun...

...When all the 60-odd guests had filed past him, a few came to see him a second time...

...I mentioned William Oatis because he supplied the most memorable vignette of the day...

...If Franklin Roosevelt's manner was that of the Cavalier, the style of Mendes-France is that of the Roundhead, of the political Calvinist...

...Mendes-France has been saying for nine years that the basic task of Government in France is reforming the domestic economy: "Aggression by force is less likely than an insidious conspiracy that could foster a destructive fifth column...

...You and I, we have seen it...

...To understand Mendes-France, whose status as an intellectual and a Jew made him especially responsive to that time's deep tides, one must read not Roger Martin du Gard, but Stendhal...

...When he occasionally had pronunciation trouble, he calmly and deliberately went back and repeated the word, phrase or sentence that had tripped him...