roreign Trends … w. s. The Voi<·e of Mendes-France A number of well-known intellec- tuals are gathering around the newly established Paris daily, L’Express. Frangois Mauriac and Albert Crunus have been alternating a regular col- umn. Andre Malraux and Albert Sauvy are among those who have sig- nified their adherence. The editor is the young and very talented journalist, Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, once the boy-wonder columnist for Le Monde. L’Express is the avowed and recognized spokesman for Pierre Mendes-France, and for his attempt to whip up a Left combination that will get him back into the premiership and keep him there long enough to insti- tute the New Deal for France that he and his followers make speeches about but haven’t yet managed to define very coherenUy (“Passion, hope, enthusi- asm-and sometimes even anger,” Mendes-France put it in an address a few years aio.) Though Mendes-France may be a bit vague about his political program, he is altogether clear about wanting to be Premier. For months, he and his spokesmen of L’Express have been de- manding elections, but they sound more than a little upset now that elec- tions are actually in the offing. Ap- parently there are a few little deals that need a while longer for fixing. Diplomats at Play In the Parliamentary debate on the Bw·gess-Maclean case, a Labor mem- ber, Mr. Robens of Blyth, filled in the gaps in the official White Paper’s re- strained reference to Maclean’s “seri- ous misconduct in Cairo” during 1950. Maclean started off, according to Mr. Robens. by fighting an Egyptian cop and then breaking the leg of a col- league while on a boating trip. Maclean and “a man friend” (Robens notes that Maclean had homosexual tendencies when drinking), both of them drunk, went to the apartment of an American girl, the librarian of the U.S. Embassy. They forced the door (the girl being absent), drank up all the liquor on hand. “pushed a lot of the girl’s cloth-
NATIONAL R.EvI£w ing down the lavatory, smashed a table,” and broke the bathtub by pounding it with a heavy marble slab. They then shifted to another apart- ment, where Maclean passed out.
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