The following, excerpted from the recently published “Yalta, The Price Of Peace” by S. M. Plokhy, is directed to the kind elderly lady at the Central Market who affectionately advised NewsLanc’s publisher to “lighten up”:
“The French minister of foreign affairs, Georges-Augustin Bidault, told [Harry] Hopkins before his meeting: ‘General de Gaulle believes that Frenchmen always try to please the man to whom they are talking. The General thinks they overdo it and he adopts a different attitude. He makes no effort to please.’….
“…when de Gaulle came to Moscow [in 1944] to sign a Franco-Soviet treaty and refused to recognize the Soviet-backed government of Poland, Stalin tried to humiliate the French leader at a reception for him in the Kremlin, proposing toasts to Roosevelt and Churchill but pointedly omitting his guest of honor. He then summoned de Gaulle to the Kremlin at 6:30 a.m. to sign the treaty, which did not take French proposals into account. When de Gaulle refused, the half-drunken dictator produced a revised text on which both parties managed to agree. By Yalta, there was no love lost between them.”
If Lancaster is to progress, it will not be because of ‘niceness’, but through ‘creative friction’. That is what existed a half century ago, before the age of industrial consolidation, when there were at least twenty major ‘players’ in town including several banks, a number of corporate headquarters, and important merchants. With that number now down to a handful, speaking truth to power is all the more essential.
Many will recall the elderly de Gaulle walking, rather than riding with other heads-of-states, behind Jack Kennedy’s funeral caisson.
